The rational-actor paradigm came to dominate economic thinking in the mid-20th century. It assumes that people are selfish and try to rationally maximize their self-interest without regard for the effects on people around them. Critics sometimes call it the rat-actor…
Blog Archives
2019 was the best year for median income on record in America. Too bad the pandemic has probably knocked it back down for 2020.
This is great news from the Census Bureau in a time when there isn’t a lot of other great news. The different saturation of the lines in the 2000s represent changes in the methodology for calculating median income, which makes…
Posted in Medianism
The CDC is hiding its covid-19 testing problem instead of fixing it.
The CDC is in charge of pandemic preparedness for the USA and it has been reporting how many covid-19 tests have been done in the US three times every week, “on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.” Today they stopped. I predicted…
Posted in Medianism
Median American wealth still lags many peers
Credit Suisse does an annual analysis of global wealth that I have written about in the past. Today, Paul Neufeld Weaver sent me an infographic showing the distribution produced by HowMuch.net, a financial literacy website: (In case the html for…
Posted in Medianism
Best place to work: McDonald’s France
French people like to do things their own way. When they brought McDonald’s to their country, they customized it right down to the famous yellow on red logo that we have in the United States. In France, they like a…
Posted in Medianism
NPR thinks the average American looks like the average Trump supporter
Planet Money and the New York Times’ Ben Casselman teamed up to try to demonstrate that, “Mode, not average, is a better way to find the typical American.” They are wrong. Here is how they set up the issue: MALONE:…
Posted in Metrology
The average Canadian became richer than the average American a decade ago.
Most people think that most Americans are richer than Canadians because that was true for most of history, but that ended a decade ago. The Great Recession of 2008 hurt Americans more than Canadians and the median income in Canada…
Posted in Medianism
