Sound Economics

The minimum wage in Washington has been of hot discussion for the past couple of years as there had been a push for higher wages for workers that had been relying on low-wage jobs. In the November election, Initiative 1433 passed across Washington to push the minimum wage up to $13.50 per hour by 2020. In other areas like Seattle and Sea-Tac, the rate can be as high as $15. Many businesses do not exactly support the increase, as they have to find a way to balance out the costs. Well, it seems that several restaurants across Washington are combatting Continue reading Restauraunts Passing the Buck to the Customer due to Minimum Wage Increase?→

India is one of the fastest growing economies, with not only a large population, but also a serious poverty issue. According to The World Bank, in 2009 India’s poverty rate hit a high of 31%!  Although it has decreased since then, the poverty rate is still quite significantly high. Generally most approaches to decrease poverty are rarely sufficient and cannot produce any significantly transformational results. Since India has evidently struggled to close the poverty gap, recently reports from the Indian government have expressed interest in creating a universal basic income. Universal basic income is an extremely uncommon approach that in theory distributes Continue reading The Cost Benefit Ratio of Universal Basic Income: India’s Dream to Close the Poverty Gap→

This is a continuation of our ongoing series investigating unblockable online advertising. Last week we took a look at Twitch.tv’s successful attempt to rework their site to support unblockable ads, and this week will be examining Facebook, the challenges they face, and their less-than-successful attempts to circumvent adblockers. Facebook boasts a tremendous number of active users, surpassing 1.86 billion in the 4th quarter of 2016. A recent article from TechCrunch (linked at the end of this piece) states that Facebook earned $8.81 billion in revenue in Q4 2016, vastly exceeding analyst estimates. Despite this tremendous success, Facebook has warned that Continue reading Facebook Struggles with the Future of Digital Ads Despite Massive Revenue→

Once a week, the writers of Sound Economics meet to talk about our ideas for the blog. Recently, we came up with the idea to include a section that links to websites that we believe would be interesting to our audience. Even more recently, I learned about from Kate Stirling in my Economics of Happiness Connections course about the OECD’s (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) Better Life Index, which ranks its 38 member countries with a combination of 11 categories: Housing, Income, Jobs, Community, Education, Environment, Civic Engagement, Health, Life Satisfaction, Safety, and Work-Life Balance. These categories are each Continue reading Better Life Index→