Homicide is the third leading cause of workplace death after vehicular accidents and falls according to the most recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Homicide is shown in the green bar below which also includes a small number…
Blog Archives
Radical political ideas that could make the world better but can’t get political support
Henry George promoted a revolutionary plan for the tax system that economists generally agree would be more fair and efficient, but 120 years after his death, still (almost) nobody cares about his great idea. Pigouvian taxes are another idea beloved…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Rising dominance of fewer corporate behemoths.
The number of publically traded corporations used to grow with the US population as you might expect. More people means more customers and more workers which creates opportunities for more corporations. But the number of public corporations peaked in 1996…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Data proves July is the best month to buy apparel online!
Austan Goolsbee and Peter Klenow compared overall inflation (red line) with inflation for goods that are sold online. They controlled for the fact that many goods like housing and fresh produce cannot be easily delivered by online vendors by matching…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Why doesn’t Amazon police their own product reviews? Market failures in everything.
About a decade ago I started seeing a lot of fake product reviews on Amazon.com. They used to be easy to spot because sometimes a bunch of reviews in a row would have almost exactly the same comments. Or sometimes…
Posted in Managerial Micro
Market failures in everything: Book publishing
Markets are only efficient when they are close to perfect competition, and if they are efficient there should not be shortages and surpluses. However, there are persistently large surpluses and shortages in the book publishing industry. There is a particularly…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Is it dangerous for a business to follow a moral philosophy other than maximize profit¿
Mark Zuckerberg wrote a 6,000-word manifesto on the history of humanity and how Facebook will shape humanity’s future. Zuckerberg’s manifesto has been subjected to a large backlash among the intelligentsia of the internet, and although it has problems, I’m glad he…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Medianism 