I talk about some of history’s horrible famines in my economic development classes and the difficulty of getting enough food in Malthusian societies. Sometimes, some of my students ask why people starved rather than going out to hunt for food.…
Blog Archives
If there were a collapse of civilization, could people go back to hunting for survival?
Posted in Development
The economics of residential density
Most Americans are used to low-density towns and suburbs and like them a lot. Many Americans have experienced unpleasant high-population-density places in America. In fact most of the high-density urban areas in the US were relatively unpleasant in recent US…
Posted in Public Finance, Real Estate
88 years of unemployment data
Unfortunately FRED has four different somewhat-overlapping data series that must be combined to get the full, long-run picture of the unemployment rate from 1929 to the present. The first data series in light green is undoubtably the least accurate of…
Finding data about places to live, study, and work
Data USA is a great place to access data for people who are thinking about where to go to college, what kind of major/career to investigate, and where to live after graduation. For example, my boys have been most interested…
Posted in Labor
Why are doctors willing to display ignorance of basic health economics?
In the Atlantic magazine, Rena Xu recently published an essay arguing that “electronic medical records and demanding regulations [are] contributing to a historic doctor shortage.” Although there are some grains of truth in the article, it is bullsh*t because it…
Posted in Health
New Monetarism as a third way beyond Hayek vs. Keynes?
David Glasner is a conservative economist who greatly admires Hayek and even thinks that Hayek’s macroeconomic theories have some merit even if they are weaker than many other theories. He is part of a small band of conservative economists that is…
Posted in Macro
The biggest health achievement in the United States in the last half century?
Kristof @ NYT: Let’s break for a quiz: What was the biggest health care breakthrough in the last 40 years in the United States? Heart bypasses? CAT scans and M.R.I.’s? New cancer treatments? No, it was the cigarette tax. Every…
Posted in Health, Millionaire Superheroes
Medianism 