As a kid I heard the joke that Mennonite women in my mother’s generation went to college to get an MRS degree and indeed, my own mother dropped out of college soon after she got married. Of course, my dad…
Blog Archives
The six most likely ways the Trump era could come to an end.
There is very very little chance that Trump will be reelected by American voters given his behavior so far and his long-run track record of consistently dismal polling numbers. The big question now is how the Trump presidency ends and…
Posted in Pence2018
Gravity equation of trade
Suppose you have a big import-export business in Puerto Rica located between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. What countries would you want to trade with most? The most convenient locations would be the closest nations, but the closest…
Posted in Globalization & International
Corporations see a high-income world even though it is mainly middle-income
OpenStax is another high-quality open-source economics textbook provider and they produced a graph comparing the distribution of global income versus the distribution of global population. Hans Rosling found that most people incorrectly think that most of the world is poor,…
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
Odd patterns in American foreign investment
Core Economics is an open-source economics textbook project based in Europe which has produced an innovative approach to teaching economics. They produced the graph below which shows “the destination of investments by US companies when they invested directly in other…
Posted in Globalization & International
World inequality updates
Last month the World Inequality Lab, located at the Paris School of Economics, released their first World Inequality Report. Here is one result: The top 1% richest people saw their income growth skyrocket and the poorest people in the world…
Posted in Inequality
Peak globalization?
The first wave of globalization happened due to technological advances in transportation and communication that dramatically reduced transactions costs in the 1800s: Railroads, steel-hulled ships, the screw propeller, telegraph, etc. Then politicians raised tariffs, restricted immigration, and went to war…
Posted in Globalization & International
