In 2007, the St. Louis Fed summarized research about the 1918 influenza pandemic and used it to predict what would happen in a pandemic like the present covid-19 crisis. Their predictions have been pretty accurate. For example, the report predicted…
Blog Archives
The addictive dangers of modernity
For all the millennia of history before modern times, humans had very few options for entertainment and recreation. Food was bland, drugs were scarce, more time was spent making music than listening to it, and most social interaction was done…
Ikigai
In 2017-18 there was an ikigai fad in the West. Several new books were simultaneously published and numerous news articles were written. Even the World Economic Forum got caught up in the fad and published an article about it. They…
Posted in Labor
This month may be the best time in history to look for a job!
One of the oddities of the macroeconomy is the fact that GDP falls wildly every year in the beginning of winter. That means that there is a kind of recession every winter. It isn’t an official recession because everyone expects…
The occupation that tops them all
Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times gets the key issue with the gender pay gap: Flexible, predictable hours are the key — across occupations — to shrinking gender gaps, according to the body of research by Claudia Goldin, an economist at…
Another ineffective health care treatment Americans waste money on
Gabrielle Glasier writes in The Atlantic about the problems of alcohol abuse and how it is treated in America. The United States already spends about $35 billion a year on alcohol- and substance-abuse treatment, yet heavy drinking causes 88,000 deaths…
