Among my idiosyncracies are two footwear anti-fetishes: I hate flip flops and high heels. I have never mastered the dark art of walking in flip flops, and I have always been troubled when women teeter at the edge of falling because of shoes designed for fashion (allegedly) rather than function. Nonetheless, I enjoyed Thursday’s Wall Street Journal piece about [...]
Archive for the ‘Life’ Category
Should High Heels Be Taxed?
Posted in Life, Microeconomics, Taxes, tagged Humor, Pigou, Taxes on April 5, 2012 | 10 Comments »
Long Spots, Short Stripes
Posted in Life, Microeconomics, tagged Art, Humor, Microeconomics on March 31, 2012 | 3 Comments »
Ran into Felix Salmon out at the Kauffman Foundation’s economic bloggers confab. His latest Felix TV breaks the contemporary art market down into two simple metrics: $ per spot and $ per stripe. Feliz says buy spots. But a word of warning: Damien Hirst seems hellbent on flooding the dot market. Somehow I think the price [...]
More on “Tribes” and Perception
Posted in Life, Politics, tagged Politics, Psychology on March 8, 2012 | 1 Comment »
My recent post on “tribes” inspired some thoughtful reader comments about natural selection and stereotyping, and two book recommendations to steel yourself against your brain’s instinctive us vs. them wiring: True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman I’ve added both to my aspirational reading pile [...]
How Your “Tribe” Affects Your Perception
Posted in Life, Politics, tagged Politics on March 5, 2012 | 5 Comments »
NPR aired an interesting trio of segments this morning about inconsistency and flip-flopping. I particularly enjoyed Alix Spiegel’s report on Jamie Barden, a psychology professor at Howard University. Barden’s work considers how “tribal” affiliation affects our perceptions of inconsistent behavior by politicians. In one experiment, Barden asked students their view of a hypothetical political operative named Mike [...]
A Sunday Numeracy Quiz
Posted in Data, Life, Teaching, tagged Ethicist, Gambling, Graphics, New York Times, Wall Street Journal on February 5, 2012 | 2 Comments »
My Sunday reading turned up three examples of glaring numeracy errors. I make plenty of my own errors, so I have sympathy for the perpetrators. But I did want to highlight them as examples of what can happen when quantitative thinking runs off the rails. And the need to remain mathematically vigilant in your daily [...]
The Behavioral Economics of Leftover Pizza
Posted in Life, Microeconomics, tagged Behavioral Economics, Humor, Life on November 30, 2011 | 10 Comments »
Jared would be proud of me. Whenever I grab lunch to eat in my office, I head over to Subway for a six-inch Veggie Delite with provolone. Just 280 calories. Yum. Depending on my mood and workload, I usually gobble down my Subway lunch between 12:15 and 1:00pm. On Monday, though, I started eating at [...]
Sign Your Tax Return in Blue Ink
Posted in Life, tagged Taxes on November 22, 2011 | 5 Comments »
Esther and I got a scary piece of mail yesterday. The fine folks at the Internal Revenue Service sent our entire tax return back to us. Minus the accompanying check, of course. A cover sheet said we had failed to sign the return, which we filed on a timely basis in October. That sounds easy to fix, except for [...]
A Great Cover of “Rolling in the Deep”
Posted in Life, tagged Music on November 20, 2011 | 1 Comment »
In case you missed it, here’s ten-year old Angie Vazquez belting out Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” accompanied by her brothers Gustavo (13) and Abelardo (15): ht: Heidi Moore P.S. I’ll get back to econ blogging soon. Super busy lately.
The Invisible Hand is Made of Delicious Invisible Meat
Posted in Life, Microeconomics, tagged Humor, Incentives, Tragedy of the Commons, TripAdvisor on September 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
The incomparable xkcd on incentives, morals, and TripAdvisor: Here’s another favorite.
How Many Continents Are There?
Posted in Life on September 16, 2011 | 1 Comment »
I love a good video about measuring and counting: I am a splitter not a lumper, so nine strikes me as at least as reasonable as seven. And the geologists have a point too … ht: Sarah Cliff at the Washington Post.
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