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Following Harold Pollack’s fine series of discussions about money management with Helaine Olen, here is another useful tidbit, which I was happy to see that the FT put on the front page yesterday. Reporters Dan McCrum and Arash Massoudi analyzed all the investment advice given out at one of those high-priced “meet the gurus” event. [...]
Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
April 30th, 2013
A Supreme Court Decision 65 years ago this week changed Hollywood forever
April 6th, 2013
A description of trade among Australian hunter-gatherers from David Graeber: In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ [...]
March 16th, 2013
Category: Economics, Policy briefs
Kathleen Geier has a nice piece in WaMo reflecting on this really heartbreaking article about the abuse restaurant workers endure. She doesn’t have a big policy solution, but recommends (i) we be civil to waitstaff and (ii) tip generously (she says 20%). I wish I agreed about (ii), but not only do I despise the [...]
March 1st, 2013
A city is the creature of its state; the states made the national government, but they were not made by their counties and cities. There is no constitutional right to elect a mayor or a city council: you get to do that if your state government thinks you should. Michigan’s shiny 2010 Republican state [...]
February 1st, 2013
In his most recent post, Matthew Kahn describes me as someone who believes that people want to keep up with the Joneses. But I’ve never felt comfortable with that way of characterizing people’s concerns about relative income, because of its apparent implication that inequality wouldn’t matter if only people could learn to ignore negative emotions [...]
January 23rd, 2013
Category: Economics
Later today the House is to vote on HR 325, a bill to suspend the debt limit until mid-May and then the debt limit will automatically be increased by the new debt incurred during the interim.* The idea is to take away the notion of defaulting and then move toward normal order budgeting (Senate and [...]
December 20th, 2012
Category: Economics, public health
A quick post on the cost of smoking v. cost of guns, given the intuitive notion that second hand smoke and violence might be (conceptually) similar. I am not an expert on guns, and this is a quick post, given as food for thought. I have done work on the social cost of cigarette smoking, [...]
November 14th, 2012
So everyone is prattling away with their grand bargain ideas on tax reform, etc. so I will re-up the basic idea at the heart of the tax reform I proposed in my book Balancing the Budget is a Progressive Priority: A tax reform that resulted in fewer rate brackets: 12, 22 and 28 were the [...]