iEconomics?
Check out this clever takeoff of the Mac/PC ads by my friend Dan Ariely, in which he portrays standard economics as a PC and behavioral economics, my specialty, as an iMac.
Check out this clever takeoff of the Mac/PC ads by my friend Dan Ariely, in which he portrays standard economics as a PC and behavioral economics, my specialty, as an iMac.
I don’t read much war history. I’m fascinated by what causes humans to end up in a state of war, but not so interested in the bloody details of how they fight their battles. Nevertheless, I thoroughly enjoyed The Day of Battle, a book by Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson. The book covers the war…
Easy to criticize the Obama administration, isn’t it? Look at the unemployment rate, for example. And have you seen the tax hikes they’re going to need to pay for healthcare reform? Oh yeah, and they did a great job with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab didn’t they?-his dad told us he was going rogue, and then when…
“With luck, Ted Kennedy will be dead soon.” She uttered these words two minutes after expressing hope that the nation would rally behind Obama. A lifelong Republican, she had voted for McCain. I expect she harbored concerned about Obama’s terrorist pals and his anti-American pastor. But with Obama now newly elected as president, she was…
Most of us have at least one cranky old relative who not only has stronger opinions than the rest of us, but is also convinced that those opinions are superior to ours. Not just content to believe that, say, voter ID laws are a good idea, this relative is also derisive of anyone with a…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…
In a wonderful New Yorker article titled “The Hangover,” Nick Paumgarten writes about the strange mix of private and government forces that led to the Spanish fiscal crisis. In a wonderful sentence, he evokes one such force, the almost invisibility of debt: It is often hard to perceive an economic crisis. Debt doesn’t look like…