I saw this a couple of hours ago on my Facebook News Feed:
Mick Greenwood loves how the Red Sox literally tell us that they’re going to raise the cost and decrease the value. Hey Jodi Beggs - Economists Do It With Models - can you smarten them up, please?
Awwww…I have my friends trained so well- [...]
Tags: Econ 101 · Reader Questions · Sports
Reader and friend Lilei emailed me the following a few weeks ago:
An individual has a constant marginal rate of substitution of shoes for slippers of 3/4 (i.e. he or she is always willing to give up 3 pairs of slippers to get 4 pairs of shoes). If slippers and shoes are equally costly, the [...]
Tags: Econ 101 · Reader Questions
I write a lot on the danger of believing the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy (which is basically a fancy Latin way of saying “One thing happened after another thing, therefore one thing happened because of another thing), also known as “don’t be stupid people, correlation does not imply causation.” To recap:
A Primer [...]
Tags: Reader Questions
From reader/friend Stephie, via post comments: In honor of your birthday, I request a blog post on the economics of gift-giving. (Yes, that’s right, it’s YOUR birthday so I get to call the shots.) What is the incentive to give a gift when cash is so much easier?
First off, she’s right. It is my [...]
Tags: Behavioral Econ · Econ 101 · Reader Questions
You may remember that I have posted a few times about wacky economic indicators, most notably Alan Greenspan’s use of men’s underwear sales as a proxy for the health of the economy.
From reader Matt: “Funny, both these and the hot waitress example seem to be relevant more for men, and our country is a slight [...]
Tags: Just For Fun · Macroeconomics · Reader Questions