Globally Rational

You are browsing the archives of Economics.

We all complain about high gas prices… personally, I’m tired of seeing the complaints. Here’s why:

Prices aren’t determined by costs; they’re determined by supply and demand. Our demand for fuel is increasing (case in point: India/China) and the supply is decreasing. My only complaint is that the government wasn’t able to foster […]

Popularity: 35% [?]

There’s a fact that I’ve always taken for granted; recently, I learned that it’s not common knowledge. It was always so obvious to me that I started to wonder why most people don’t know this.
Did you know that the Middle East is generally impressed with Western culture? People often think that the anti-American sentiment we […]

Popularity: 22% [?]

I’ve always wondered why people stay in a city that they hate.  I’ve met plenty of people in Boston or St. Louis or Columbia (Missouri) who complain about the weather or the costs or the people.  Why not just move to whatever place fits your lifestyle best?
This was a major part of my decision to […]

Popularity: 23% [?]

I’ve come across a lot of people who oppose the recent suggestion of implementing a sales tax on Internet purchases.  My favorite line of reasoning is the argument (which I heard on a radio interview with a random online retailer) that some of these businesses are already just barely scratching a profit and that a […]

Popularity: 21% [?]

This is the first post in the “Nominal Breakthroughs” series, which will talk about news that is farcically touted as groundbreaking.
The fight against political corruption is one of the most important tasks confronting many of today’s developing countries; for instance, many leaders have stolen billions of dollars (which is worth a lot more in Africa/Asia […]

Popularity: 16% [?]

A few days ago, Hillary Clinton decided that economists are wrong about the potential effect of a gas tax rebate. Her exact words: “I’m not going to put my lot in with economists … We’ve got to get out of this mindset where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things […]

Popularity: 14% [?]

About a week ago, I wrote about how humanity seems to be disturbingly close to the mass die-off that Thomas Malthus predicted 200 years ago. In that last week, I’ve come across a huge amount of additional evidence suggesting that this theoretical catastrophe might soon become a reality:

Food riots have been taking place around […]

Popularity: 17% [?]

Yesterday, I wrote about how we’re incentivizing scientists to stop innovating. In that post, I promised to suggest some solutions today. Here are some things we can do to foster increased scientific innovation:

We should require institutional research boards (IRBs) to include more scientifically knowledgeable personnel, so that decisions can be made by scientists […]

Popularity: 20% [?]

In today’s world, a culture of innovation is integral to advancement at the same rate that we’ve seen in the past century, especially in the medical field. Unfortunately, some scientists have done a few unethical things in the past; because of this, we’ve decided to severely restrict all scientific research. Here is how […]

Popularity: 24% [?]

About 200 years ago, the mathematician Thomas Robert Malthus famously wrote an equation predicting that the human population would soon reach the planet’s ecological carrying capacity, causing many of us to die off because of the lack of food and resources (just like what we have often seen with other species). He expected it […]

Popularity: 34% [?]