The War on Drugs…in 1511

Abyssinian goat herders may have been the first people to use the coffee bean for it’s psychoactive properties. The goat herders were likely to have observed their goats eating  red berries off one particular tree, Cofea. After trying the berries themselves the goat herders experienced the psychoactive properties of the berries, and somewhere along the line they learned to roast the beans to make coffee. Now, caffeine is the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive substance. And though it has become the world’s leading choice of stimulant, what happened before it achieved it’s popular status? Why was coffee banned with such force? Continue reading The War on Drugs…in 1511

Thesis Corner: Coffee Price Shocks on National Health

If we were to extract pithy lessons from literature like Freakonomics and Everything I Needed To Know About Economics I Learned from Online Dating, it’s that there is an economic dimension to everything. The reason I love writing for this blog is because it allows us to look at seemingly ordinary subjects we take for granted and examine them from new angles and perspectives. I spoke with Jared Soares about his thesis and he gave me another fresh perspective about the economics behind everything. Jared took an interesting approach with his thesis: rather than making a laymen’s subject economical, he analyzed how economic phenomena Continue reading Thesis Corner: Coffee Price Shocks on National Health