I know this will come as a real shock to our regular readers, but it turns out that increasing minimum wage doesn’t actually help the poor very much. It just increases the workload on fewer employees. In other words, it stimulates unemployment: The study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that minimum […]
Continue reading →Given the amount of money Bill Gates has made, one would think he already understood how the private sector works. But his recent comments concerning green energy research and the public and private sector makes me think he has no idea what he’s talking about: Yes, the government will be somewhat inept… But the private […]
Continue reading →“The Economy” might just be my least favorite over-simplification ever, right behind “Science,” “they say,” and “the Government.” What exactly is The Economy? Before you react with, “Well, of course everyone knows what the economy is,” I just want you to think about it. Define The Economy. It’s kind of hard, right? The problem is […]
Continue reading →Germany has a serious population problem. This year marks its lowest production of babies ever, and previous years were already particularly infertile. Pundits warn that Germany will soon start to reap the bitter consequences of its demographic suicide. But at least Germans are having “satisfying” sexual experiences: Germany is the 11th most sexually satisfied country […]
Continue reading →Recently Bill Gates questioned the supply-side, tax-cut economic theory by bringing up that the American period with the highest GDP growth in recent memory, the 60s, also had one of the highest marginal tax rates in recent memory, at 90% (for most of the decade anyway). He was careful not to say that the high […]
Continue reading →Yesterday, I wrote an article about a deceptive shift of language from “income inequality” to “income inequity.” In it, I quoted Barack Obama, who recently claimed that hedge fund investors were the “nation’s lottery winners.” I think his dismissive assessment deserves another look, since it represents the attitude so many Americans have toward the wealthy. […]
Continue reading →I have been noticing a trend in recent discussions of income inequality. Commentators have started replacing income inequality with income inequity. At first, I thought this subtle shift was a result of ignorance. In our word-impoverished culture, the right words get swapped for incorrect similar-sounding ones all the time (e.g., “disinterested” for “uninterested”). But as […]
Continue reading →An interesting program called the Moving to Opportunity Experiment explored what happens when you move poor families in impoverished neighborhoods to more affluent neighborhoods. A little more than twenty years later, Harvard analysts looked in on the children of the MTO experiment. The results were quite fascinating: The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment offered randomly selected […]
Continue reading →There’s one term you’re not likely to hear much in this presidential election cycle: middle class. Apparently the term is political kryptonite right now, especially since no one really knows what it means and most Americans don’t identify as middle class anymore: “In the 1960s, ‘middle class’ felt like it fit your lifestyle,” said Felicia […]
Continue reading →In what could prove to be disastrous for the average Chinese day laborer, factories in the Pearl River Delta have decided to start replacing their human workforces with robots: Robots are to invade factories in the Pearl River Delta as manufacturers gear up their investments in technology to take advantage of government incentives such as […]
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