It’s been about 7 years since I last wrote about the economics of solar eclipses. A lot has changed since then, but one thing remains constant: eclipses are a big deal. This year, an estimated 5 million people will travel in the US to see the April 8th, 2024 total solar eclipse, and that number … More Solar Eclipse 2024 Dynamics
In a recent segment of NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin was asked half-jokingly if all economists marry other economists. Not exactly, she responded: “It’s not all economists married to other economists; there are very few female economists in a various age groups, and a disproportionate number of those are … More Proportional Statistics
I’m a fan of zero-based budgeting because of its simplicity: Income – Expenses = 0. This means you account for everything, saving and spending, when setting your budget. As a result, you make sure savings is a key priority for your long-term goals instead of becoming an afterthought. What goes into a zero-based budget? The … More Zero-Based Budgeting
There were a lot of notable bankruptcies in 2023. This ranged from the biggest bank failures since the Great Recession (Silicon Valley Bank) to former startup titans (WeWork), longstanding American brands (Bed Bath & Beyond, Yellow), and US subsidiaries of massive international companies (Evergrande). To wrap up the year, let’s dive into some of the … More 2023 and Bankruptcies
Why don’t we use half dollar coins or $2 bills in everyday transactions? Convenience shapes our demand for money. Beyond the worlds of currency supply/demand or collectible coins, let’s investigate the literal choices for why people prefer one physical form of US currency over another. First, why might people choose physical money over digital options? … More The Demand for (Physical) Money
“I’m sorry I wrote you a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” -Blaise Pascal [from Lettres Provinciales] Modern society often confounds mastery and complexity. Someone who speaks in the jargon of their field, pairing big words and in-depth concepts with a silver tongue, is assumed to be brilliant. But the … More Mastery is Simplicity
There’s been a lot of buzz around collective action recently. From threatened strikes at UPS and hospitals across the nation, walkoffs from Los Angeles city workers and United Auto Workers (UAW), and a near-record battle in Hollywood (where the WGA and SAG unions have gone on strike together for the first time in nearly 60 … More Collective Action Takes Center Stage
Zoom made headlines this week for announcing its own “return to office” policy, requiring all workers within a 50-miles radius of an office to commute at least 2 times a week. It’s certainly ironic for a company that massive expanded thanks to remote work. It’s also not the only one. Across industry and geography, companies … More Where to Work, and Why?
Have you checked the price of a Big Mac recently? It’s a fascinating indicator for our purchasing power in the United States. I use data from the US Department of Labor and The Economist’s Big Mac Index to calculate how many Big Macs the average minimum-wage US worker could afford from 1 hour of gross … More Econ in the News: (Big Mac) Food for Thought
The new buzzword in Silicon Valley is “Reduction In Force”, or RIF. In the past six months, hundreds of thousands of people have been laid off by tech companies, with these RIFs following a similar playbook: call out “the macroeconomic environment”, slash some teams, and offer a severance that’s just big enough to avoid any … More RIF Raff
Andrew Jabara 