Tag: Margins of Adjustment
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Economic Impact of a Dragon Year: Luck vs. Reality
The Year of Dragon is believed to auspicious and lucky in Chinese culture. Research has found that more than the usual number of babies are born in China during Dragon Years, and that there are more marriages than usual. Then what? To recognize the end of the Year of the Dragon and the start of…
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Achieving your New Year’s Resolutions: The Margins Principle
People state New Year’s Resolutions (“stop drinking”, “stop smoking”, “lose 30 pounds”, …) to make a big improvement in their life. Famously, most fail. This issue is not isolated to decisions made on New Year’s Day or to people trying to make themselves better. There are deeper lessons to be learned: thinking about the margins…
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Unexpected Economic Insights During Christmas
Christmas is an enjoyable time for many, including many non-Christians living in countries where Christians are a minority. It is a time for presents and food and thinking of others. This post identifies some unexpected ways that the five basic principles of economics appear during this time. Familiar attempts to apply economic ideas to Christmas…
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“Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward.”
This quote by Oscar Wilde offers a lesson to students who are bored by studying. You can complain that your teacher is world class, at curing insomnia. You can complain that the examples used in class were excellent, 50 years ago. You can complain that doing well on tests is irrelevant, since employers rarely ask…
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Making Sense of Numbers: Practical Comparisons
Many people who want to study economics get confused about the scale of numbers. Understanding the scale of a number adds context and invites comparisons, which leads to the question “does it make a difference?”. Understanding scale may seem like a mathy thing, but it is really about communication. This post is motivated by a…
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The Challenges and Opportunities of using GenAI: Business and Education
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is a very impressive general purpose technology: it can write poetry, recipes, cover letters for jobs and (after several suggestions were rejected) these images. The people who developed the foundations were recently recognized with a Nobel Prize. Every new and old business seems to claim that it is using AI: e.g.,…
5 Basic Principles of Economics 