~undercover-economis | Bookmarks (18)

Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.) […]

The Bodleian Library’s exhibition Oracles, Omens and Answers offers a rather different perspective on prognostication than the FT’s usual position. Instead of economists and political pollsters, the exhibition discusses predictions made using the stars, or children’s games, or, most strikingly, large Cameroonian spiders. That last one works like this. The spider is presented with a […]

Of all the dubious claims uttered recently by Elon Musk, I have yet to see a more interesting one than his tweet asserting that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending. Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better.” Whether or not […]

John von Neumann — the man who created game theory, advanced many branches of mathematics and physics, and did more than anyone to design the modern computer — was someone who attracted a certain amount of mythology. One story about von Neumann has a colleague setting him a fun puzzle. In this puzzle, two trains, […]

The most interesting architecture story of recent months is neither Adrien Brody’s Oscar for playing an architect, nor Donald Trump’s executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. It was the revelation, late last year, that the first building to win the prestigious Stirling Prize is now scheduled to be demolished. The building, the University of […]

The death in February of an octogenarian named Donald Shoup did not make many headlines, but it did prompt a flood of admiring social media conversations among the “Shoupistas”, a small but fervent fan club of the man they called Shoup Dogg. Shoup was a tweed-wearing, extravagantly bearded economist. What had such a man done […]

Think globally, act locally, they used to say. If it’s true, why does it matter that the US has — again — withdrawn support for international co-ordination on climate change? In the mid-20th century, the US emitted about as much carbon dioxide as every other country in the world combined. Now its share of global […]

Since nothing seems to be off the table when it comes to trade policy, I thought I might put forward a modest two-step trade policy reform to make America great again. Step one, levy a substantial tax on all exports, from aeroplanes to soyabeans. Such a tax will squeeze America’s most internationally competitive industries. That’s […]

As a tourist, the only reasonable response to Venice’s all-consuming beauty is to gasp in admiration after rounding every corner. As an economist, another response occurs: once upon a time, this city must have been incredibly wealthy. From Bruges to Kyoto, being eclipsed after making it rich has long been a reliable way for cities […]

Highbrow pleasure recently: the Royal Opera House, and Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa. The opera was first performed when the composer was 50, and it was followed by an outpouring of new music, better than anything he had managed in his supposed prime. My favourites include Sinfonietta and Glagolitic Mass, both composed shortly before his death at […]

On the first of January, you can’t move without bumping into an article about new year’s resolutions. The same cannot be said about the first of February — and that may be part of the problem. Each year begins with us in full Bridget Jones mode, resolving to turn over a new leaf. Sometimes we […]

Richard Easterlin died in December at the age of 98. He’s been called “the father of happiness economics”, and it’s hard to disagree. Fifty years ago, after struggling to find an economics journal with any interest in the topic, Easterlin published an article titled “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?” It planted the seeds […]

Leah Washington and her new boyfriend Joe Pugh are on their first day out together. They’re at Alton Towers theme park, where they’ve chosen to ride the “Smiler” rollercoaster: a terrifying tangle of track that loops and swoops through a world-record 14 inversions. Leah and Joe are seated right at the front of the train, […]

Imagine that a certain person — let’s call them Robin — is walking across a college campus when they pass a doorway and notice a man slumped on the ground. The man coughs and moans as Robin passes. Will Robin stop and help? To answer the question, we might want to know more about Robin. […]

Rarely a day goes by that I don’t look out of my window to notice a car travelling east down my quiet little street. That is unremarkable, you might think — except that the street is one-way, running west. The street doesn’t function as a cut-through, so my guess is that these drivers aren’t flouting […]

Here’s the problem with forecasts: some of them are right, and some of them are wrong, and by the time we find out which is which, it’s too late. This leads to what we might call the forecasting paradox: the test of a useful forecast is not whether it turns out to be accurate, but […]

What if the total sum of wealth in the world was immediately and simultaneously redistributed equally among the six billion adult people in the world? — Bezz UBS’s Global Wealth Report puts global wealth at around $450tn, which would mean each adult would get about $75,000. On the day that your proposal goes into effect, […]

Robert F Kennedy Jr is a man best known for his years of tireless work undermining public confidence in vaccines, and repeating long-debunked claims about their health risks. The likelihood that he will take charge of all US healthcare policy is a bracing prospect. Until an arsonist is put in charge of a fire department, […]