It is common to hear politicians and financiers these days saying that things are different now. That lessons have been learned. That changes to regulation will ensure that this sort of thing is unlikely to happen again in future. Of course, people say these things after every crisis. Now Vox reports a study that attempts […]
Skill vs luck: “There’s a part of our brain that’s called the interpreter,” he says. “It’s designed to make sense of what we’ve seen, to give it a narrative. And we always see causes; so if Person A succeeds where Person B fails, we assume that Person A had some skill that Person B didn’t. […]
Acemoglu and Robinson have proven to be extremely combative bloggers but they have, until now, refrained from engaging directly with their nemesis. Well, it seems they might have been harbouring a little bit of a grudge: Several people asked us why we haven’t responded to Jeffrey Sachs’s review of Why Nations Fail. Well the answer […]
I share Holly Walker’s concern about the plight of post-graduate students. She is disturbed by a new survey showing that [post-graduate students] committed to finishing their study highlight[ed] concerns about being able to provide basic needs for themselves without access to the [recently cut student] allowance, such as food and shelter. As Matt has discussed […]
Vox says the data supports Matt’s priors: There is an old debate in economic theory… about whether advertising increases or decreases the prices of consumer goods. Some have argued that advertising provides information to consumers, such as information on prices or the existence of products. This information increases the degree of competition in a market, […]
Apparently UK supermarkets sometimes advertise deals that charge prices higher than the usual, listed price: In the worst cases, Which? found that supermarkets doubled the shelf price of an item when they began promoting it as a money-saving multibuy. It found that Asda was selling a Goodfella’s Deep Pan Pepperoni pizza at a standard price […]