Category Archives: Economics

I was recently purchasing my plane tickets for my trip home over Thanksgiving weekend. After experiencing a real-life example of a price gouge, I asked myself if I was buying these plane tickets at the right time to minimize the price that I have to pay. My thinking was that there must be some sort of “sweet spot” for when plane tickets are cheapest. I wasn’t sure if it would just the earlier the better as airlines can charge more as people become more desperate to book a trip, or if you could actually book a flight too early. When Continue reading When to buy airline tickets→

The discussion of the presence of poverty traps in certain impoverished areas has been a very important and somewhat controversial developmental economic idea for decades. It is most frequently described as a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist. As further explained in Poor Economics by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, your income today influences what your income will be in the future. The amount of money you have today determines what you eat, how much money spent on health, education, ways to improve your work, etc., which in turn influences your income in the future. The poverty trap is seen Continue reading Rethinking the Poverty Trap: A Multidimensional Approach→

Despite the vilification of the “1%”, occupation of financial centers like Wall Street and the visibly widening income gap, many Americans don’t actually know how severe the United States’ economic inequality is. In fact, those surveyed for Michael Norton’s (Harvard Business School) new study on public opinion of executive pay grossly underestimated the pay gap between the average worker and CEOs. According to the AFL-CIO, the average American worker makes about $34,000 a year, while the average CEO earns more than $12 million. For a better understanding of such a disparity, the average American worker makes about .28% of what the average Continue reading Americans Underestimate Economic Inequality and the Pay Gap→

Last Thursday, Career and Employment Services hosted an event called ASK Night, where Puget Sound alumni generously volunteer their time to talk to students about what career-related endeavors they’ve been up to since graduation. I thought this would be a great opportunity to chat with some former Economics majors, see how they’ve been doing, and how their studies helped them with their careers. I was disappointed to discover online that out of the 50 or so alumni that attended, only three majored in Economics (and a very small handful minored in it). Out of the three Economics majors, I had the time Continue reading ASK Night: Words of Wisdom from Former Econ Majors→

Kal Draws is a video series put on by The Economist. Each of these cartoons takes a basic economic concept and attempts to illustrate it in a minute or two. Here is their cartoon on trade, take a look for yourself. Not everyone needs to master economics to have a meaningful opinion about economics. So when a popular economic news source tries to pass off extremely biased and uninformative media as accurate information on basic econ terminology, it’s embarrassing. There is some good information here. It’s true, trade does benefit countries. Theory and practice tells us that by specializing in the production of Continue reading Don’t be fooled, Loggers.→

Last week I talked about how movie studios make their money, why the constant price of theater tickets is a very bizarre phenomenon and then I told everyone I’d explain why, a year before its currently scheduled release, JJ Abrams has been ‘leaking’ information to the media about the upcoming release of Star Wars 7. I promise this is all related somewhere down the line. Theaters charge the same price for a ticket, regardless of movie, and movies can vary both in quality and cost to produce. Let’s imagine for a minute that you show up to the movie theater, Continue reading Theaters, Asymmetrical Information, and Star Wars 7 (Part II)            →

This post continues the discussion from my last post, which raised the question: why has the Ebola crisis become so severe? Another contributing factor: the “dismal” response of the World Health Organization (WHO), a United Nations auxiliary organization. As an international public health crisis, this crisis falls squarely in the sphere of the WHO. To be clear, response to Ebola is not the sole responsibility of the WHO. In the words of the director general of WHO, “And we are not the first responder. You know, the government has first priority to take care of their people and provide health care. W.H.O. is a Continue reading Ebola: Why is it so bad? (Part 3)→