I am teaching International Trade this semester and there are two models of trade that are important to teach, but there weren’t any resources that teach all the main intuitions without excessive complexity so I wrote my own “textbook” chapters…

Suppose that there is a population of eleven people on an island and they are all equally racist.  There are ten whites who hate blacks and one black who hates whites.  If they all express their racism by hurling stones at the…

The rational-actor paradigm came to dominate social sciences such as economics 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…