Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much
“The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.” We’re busier than ever. The typical inbox is perpetually swelling with messages awaiting attention. …
“The biggest mistake we make about scarcity is we view it as a physical phenomenon. It’s not.” We’re busier than ever. The typical inbox is perpetually swelling with messages awaiting attention. …
From Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania (now at Minnesota’s Carlson School of …
King Solomon, thought by some to be the wisest man who ever lived, anticipated the economists concept of separating equilibria by about 3,000 years. In his most famous case, he proposed cutting a baby …
I finally got around to reading Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. The book brings to light some of the complexities of poor people’s lives by exploring the …
From Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen There are many subtleties and twists in the story … but the basic message, roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable …
Charlie Munger on applying Gresham’s Law. The idiotic ideas are all from the social science department and I would put economics in the social sciences department although it has some tinges of …
“Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson.” No tree can afford to not …
What are the most important ideas ever put forward in social science? I’m not asking what are the best ideas, so the truth of them is only obliquely relevant: a very important idea may be largely …
“States don’t fail overnight. The seeds of of their destruction are sown deep within their political institutions.” Is it culture, weather, or Geography? What about war or some …
As James Surowiecki illustrates in an excellent piece in the New Yorker, the pursuit of perfect fairness causes a lot of terrible problems in system function. Surowiecki calls this The Fairness Trap: …
I have posed at two different business schools the following problem. I say, “You have studied supply and demand curves. You have learned that when you raise the price, ordinarily the volume you can …
If you’d like to read more about economics issues try these 18 books recommended by Greg Mankiw, author of Principles of Economics. The Cartoon Introduction to Economics Basic economic …
Other things being equal when the price of a good rises, the quantity demanded should fall. Economics refer to this as the law of demand. Because there are many counter-examples to this law it’s …
Whenever coins containing precious metals have been used along with base metal coins of the same denomination, both legally accepted as tender, the bad coins have driven the good coins out of …
In economics, comparative advantage refers to the ability of a person or nation to produce a good or service at a lower opportunity cost than another person (or nation). This is why trade can create …
Supply and demand is a foundational economic mental model. Understanding it is instrumental in building a better picture of how the world works. *** The law of demand states that there is an inverse …