The governor of Florida, Rick Scott, declared that he wants to eliminate the liberal arts majors at state universities and community colleges because he does not think that they produce job skills. However, liberal arts majors (humanities, social sciences, science, and…
Blog Archives
Alcohol deaths are rising. Happy New Year.
See updated version that I reposted for spring break.
Posted in Labor, Public Finance
Anthropomorphizing Bill Gates as the God of Microsoft
It is human to anthropomorphize. We like to personify holidays into heroic figures like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny and personify companies as Ronald McDonald or the Michelin Man. The flourishing of art and culture of entire eras is…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Inequality decimates the heroes of the cult of the entrepreneur
Webster has two definitions of ‘entrepreneur’. The first definition is “a person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money.” By this definition, high inequality creates a lot of entrepreneurs. Extremely poor people…
The freaky economics of socialist healthcare in Britain
Below is an excerpt from Think Like A Freak, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Shortly after the publication of Superfreakonomics [2009], while on a book tour in England, we were invited to meet David Cameron, [the Leader of the Conservative Party] who would…
Why do stocks rise faster than incomes? Is that a good thing?
The US stock market has had faster long-run growth than US incomes (GDP). The FRED graph below shows data for a little more than a half century, but stock values have historically grown considerably faster then incomes since the beginning of…
Bankster politics in a Christmas classic
Julia Szabo organized a poll of favorite Christmas movies at a Bluffton faculty/staff celebration and my favorite, Elf, won the poll (yea!). She also passed along some trivia about some of the top movies including this: “It’s a Wonderful Life”…
Posted in Macro
Medianism 