Image courtesy of Rose Colligan. Most economic research is a process of adding to ideas that have already been thought of. In Mrs Lovett’s case her grand plan involves adding concepts to Sweeney Todd’s welfare policy. Now if you haven’t seen the movie yet, this might be a bit more of a spoiler than the […]
‘Inflation psychology’ was the topic of a recent inflation update by Stephen Cecchetti (h.t. Freakonomics blog). In it he mentions that people seem to have selective memories regarding price changes – namely people are likely to remember price increases more than price falls. I once mentioned such a potential bias when I commented on Kiwiblogblog, […]
Stuff mentions a survey done by Research New Zealand on petrol prices and household consumption of petrol. In the survey they found a number of results that seem to follow the basic idea of a demand curve. From the article the results were: 32% of people said they consumed less fuel since the price rose […]
After recently watching the movie ‘Sweeney Todd‘ one question popped into my mind, is the welfare policy he derives optimal? Below the flap I will discuss his welfare policy – if you haven’t seen the movie or watched the broadway show then read at your own risk. Although I don’t talk about the movie itself, […]
I am a Liverpool supporter (the football club), I’m proud to admit it 🙂 . While I was reading an interview with Fernando Torres today, I ran into this gem of a line when discussing Benitez’s rotation policy: “It is normal to rest. We players never want to, but if the manager says so, you […]
Reading the titles of the last two posts (the birth rate vs the growth rate and growth forecasts and government) I realised that neither rauparaha or myself defined what ‘growth’ we were talking about. Like all economists, we took ‘Growth’ to be synonymous with growth in gross domestic product. Could this possibly imply that economists […]