In several of my recent posts, I laid out my case for how it might not undermine all of economic thinking to find that people aren’t necessarily rational. One of my key points was that you can model irrationality as rationality, but this does raise the question: What good are models in the first place? [...]
Of all the good books I’ve read recently, the best so far is probably Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies and Other Pricing Puzzles by Richard McKenzie. The EconTalk podcast on the subject is an enduring favorite, and I’ve probably listened to it 3 or 4 times since it originally aired last year.
The [...]
A while back, I found myself having a discussion with a friend about how much good it actually does to be a vegetarian. That is to say that if your goal as a vegetarian is to reduce the total amount of meat consumed for whatever reason, how much does opting out of the consumption of [...]
When I first saw this USA Today article about Michael Steel’s “new arguments” against gay marriage, I decided not to blog about it because I thought that the counter-argument was amazingly obvious. Amazingly, Keith Olbermann picked up the story and somehow managed to completely miss how fucking stupid Steele’s argument is while countering with his [...]
In response to this post on the economics of panhandling, Jurij made a detailed case for why giving money to homeless people isn’t the cause of homelessness. I will start out by saying that I completely agree that giving money to homeless people is not the sole cause of homelessness. I also agree that [...]
For those who don’t know, the city I live in (Berkeley, CA), and the bay area in general, is absolutely teeming with homeless people. Their ubiquity was one of the more annoying things that I had to adjust to when I first moved here – it seemed like everywhere I went and no matter what [...]
Lately there has been a lot of talk about “saving jobs” and “creating jobs” in the media and in politics as if it were completely obvious that this is something that you should want. What people really want is a source of income, and their job is the price that they pay to get that [...]
Physical chemistry Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and all around curious guy.