According to a Fed report released in May, 53% of American households could raise $400 to cover a financial emergency without selling property or paying the interest burden of borrowing money for more than a month. That is a bit better…
Blog Archives
Happiness Statistics Need The Median
I am taking students to Columbia next year and so I saw that it was rated the happiest country in the world according to Gallup polls a couple years ago and is #2 in the current ranking. This is surprising…
Posted in Medianism
GDP Was Designed For Warfare Not Welfare
When intellectuals first began to think about economics, they tended to think about the interests of the elites who controlled the government. That is how economics got its name back in the 16th century. The term economics comes from the…
Is your family earning twice as much as your parents were 40 years ago (in real dollars)? You should be.
FRED data shows that real per-capita income in the US has doubled since 1975 even despite the financial crisis of 2008. Unfortunately, this income growth mainly went to the top 10% richest Americans. Median family income was stagnant from the…
Elites are more important than everyone else because much of our wellbeing depends on them.
There is vast difference between the lives of ordinary people north of the Rio Grande river versus the people to the south. There are even greater differences between the lives of people across other arbitrary political borders like between North…
Marginal value is a misnomer. Market prices reveal the median value.
Ever since the Marginal Revolution of the late 19th century, economics has been defined by marginal benefit and marginal cost. That is what determines the most famous picture in economics, the supply and demand graph. The demand curve is really the marginal benefit…
How much inequality is ideal within your workplace?
Nicholas Fitz at Scientific American has a good summary of recent research about American perceptions of inequality. Answer two questions below to test yourself and see how your answers compare with the average American. 1) How much more should CEOs get paid…
Medianism 