Most Americans spend about the same percent of their income on clothing regardless of how much they earn. For example, people who earn $5,000 per year might spend about $200 on clothing whereas Americans who earn $150,000 per year spend…
Blog Archives
When you get a 10% raise, will you suddenly need to spend 10% more on food and clothing?
Posted in Development, Globalization & International
Marc Andreessen wants to put teachers out of work but he doesn’t know what he is talking about
Vox posted a series of interviews with Marc Andreessen in which the billionaire co-founder of Netscape seems to feel that most of the economy outside of silicon valley is simply backwards. …you have the sectors in which prices are rapidly…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Inequality in South Africa and Ukraine
Consider the economic wellbeing of South Africa and Ukraine in 2003. South Africa’s mean income at $10,400 was 67% higher than Ukraine’s at only $6,220 but Ukraine’s life expectancy was 67.4 years which is 25% higher than in South Africa at 53.7…
Posted in Inequality, Medianism
Did we reach peak market circa year 2000?
For centuries, markets have been expanding into ever greater spheres of human life and displacing non-market human interaction. This has been an exciting time for economists because economists mostly just study markets. This has led economists to neglect major spheres of…
Economic Innovation Group & medianism
I commend the Economic Innovation Group for using median income rather than mean income to create their Index of Distressed Communities. They created a beautiful map of their Distressed Community Index where the old slave states and rural areas of…
Posted in Medianism, MELI & Econ Stats
The median voter’s income is well above the median income
Dylan Matthews compiled a lot of data about the 2014 election including this graph of voter income: Unfortunately, he didn’t divide up the graph according to median income. That would give a more meaningful comparison because we could see what…
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
A mmutilitarianist world map
If you make the area of each nation proportional to its share of world GDP, this is what you get: This is a pretty realistic picture of how markets view the world. Markets are mmutilitarian and care about maximizing the…
Posted in Medianism, MELI & Econ Stats
Medianism 