Updated January 9, 2024 Julie Beck wrote that In America, we treat the mouth separately from the rest of the body, a bizarre situation that Mary Otto explores in… Teeth: The Story of Beauty, Inequality, and the Struggle for Oral…
Yearly Archives: 2019
Which space is more important for determining your wellbeing, work or home?
Vs. Most working adults in Western nations spend more waking hours at work than at home. Why do people spend so much time at work (and on long commutes) in order to spend as much as they can on large,…
Posted in Labor
The Lead Conspiracy
Update: March 19, 2023 How much money would be enough compensation to poison yourself? Not enough to kill you, but enough to make you seriously ill. Suppose you could earn millions of dollars for getting mildly poisoned and then you…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Is the Fed finally thinking about Americans at the median income and below?
Most people think that the president has a lot of power over the economy, but that isn’t true. Presidents have very little direct power over the economy by law. The Fed is the only part of government that has the…
Posted in Macro
The minimum wage is nearly dead
The federal government has just set the record for the longest period of time without an increase in the minimum wage to keep up with inflation. The minimum wage has now been ignored for over a decade and Kevin Drum…
Is reading the most efficient way to consume information?
The average reader is a speed reader. Medium.com says they assume their average readers read at 275 words per minute (wpm) (or sometimes they claim 260 wpm). I averaged their estimated reading speed for nine essays and they really estimated…
Posted in Culture, Personal (not econ)
What immigration crisis?
The Pew Research Center reports data that unauthorized immigrants in the US are at the lowest level in a decade of gradual declines. Meanwhile, more and more Americans are favoring more legal immigration, so Americans aren’t suddenly becoming more nativist. …
Posted in Globalization & International, Labor
Medianism 