We Americans are notoriously bad at saving money. While people in Germany, Sweden and even France save about 10% of the money they make, folks in the U.S. save closer to 3 or 4% of their earnings. With so little money saved, Americans face difficulty absorbing economic shocks like recessions and layoffs, and also find…
As someone who has been working in the field of behavioral economics for a couple decades now, I have long been aware of what psychologists call “the availability heuristic.” This was a phenomenon described by Kahneman and Tversky in some of their seminal research from the early 1970s. I recently came across a nice example…
This is WAY outside my normal blogging topicry (topicry?), but I had to point you towards a Smithsnonian article called “Art Attack” by Will Ellsworth-Jones, if for no other reason than to check out the images recreated there of a British street artist named Bansky. Here is one of my favorites, that nicely captures the creativity…
Here is a quick summary from the Wall Street Journal of what the U.S. Federal Debt looks like now that we have avoided, at least for now, the fiscal cliff. As you will see, we didn’t do much to balance the budget. In the short run, that is ok. Too much balancing, too quickly, and…
“If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.” -Clay Shirky (Click here to view comments)
When New Jersey decided to hike its minimum wage by some 20 percent in 1991, David Card and Alan Krueger recognized a tremendous opportunity to test how the minimum wage affects employment.
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