Here are three views of the Chicago skyline. The top photo is a rare day with high air pollution in the 1990s, but that was a typical scene in the 1970s and the third is how Chicago looks today: All…
Blog Archives
Economics of global warming
Economists are not trained in climate science, so there is no reason to ask one of us about how much carbon dioxide will warm the planet, but economics is an important part of climate policy–this is our collective response to…
Posted in Globalization & International
The political economy of farm policy
Below is a map of farm subsidy payments. These are the addresses where farm “welfare” checks were sent and the bigger circles show addresses that got sent up to ¼ million dollars in 2007 alone. This map comes from an…
Posted in Globalization & International
How climate skeptics are distributed across America
The Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies has data about public perceptions on the facts of global warming. As of 2018, almost twice as many Americans believe global warming is caused by humans as those who disagree (57% to…
Posted in Environment
1/3 of Bloomberg articles are written by artificial intelligence!
Artificial intelligence is taking over more and more jobs. The NYT reports that more and more journalism is actually being written by robots including nearly 1/3 of Bloomberg articles. “robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league…
Posted in Globalization & International, Inequality
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
