Tag: economics

Fake Victims

On a personal level this is a tragedy, and there seems little doubt her agent committed fraud, but it is closer to farce. I mean, c’mon: This is someone who couldn’t speak the language, and yet got no advice when making the biggest financial decision of her life. She had to know she was taking immense financial risks (numbers are numbers, whether in Spanish or English), but did nothing to ameliorate her obvious risks, and is now being presented as a victim.

hard to be sympathetic. just like the infatuation with cars, the ‘own your home’ fetish needs to be overcome before real progress can be made.

Technology Diffusion

Broadly, 2 sets of obstacles stand in the way of technological progress in emerging economies. The first is their technological inheritance. Most advances are based on the labours of previous generations: you need electricity to run computers and reliable communications for modern health care, for instance. So countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones. Mobile phones, which require no wires, are a prominent exception. Yet it would be wrong to be gloomy about the technological outlook of emerging economies. The channels of technology transfer have widened enormously over the past 10 years. Technological literacy has risen, especially among the young. But all this has helped emerging economies mainly in the first stage: absorption. The second stage—diffusion—has so far proved much more testing.

diffusion patterns

Commitment Contracts

stickK is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle by allowing users to create “Commitment Contracts” that oblige them to follow through with commitments such as exercise and quitting smoking.

behavioral econ startup. the contacts pledged so far have an average value of $50. this should be interesting once we are talking real money

Fertility Control

People in poor countries are now able to exert more control over their own fertility, and hence over the size of their families. A generation ago the biggest worry about poor countries was over-population. Books such as “The Population Bomb” (1968) and “The Limits to Growth” (1972) predicted Malthusian crises in countries where women were having 5 children or more. Since then the fertility rate (the average number of children a woman can expect during her lifetime) in low- and middle-income countries has crashed. In East Asia and the Pacific, the rate was 5.4 in 1970. Now it is 2.1. In South Asia, the fertility rate halved (from 6.0 to 3.1). In the world as a whole, fertility has fallen from 4.8 to 2.6 in a generation (25 years).

gini coefficient rises with technological progress

Marriage and the Market

Trends in marital behavior reflect a common-sense response to the economic and social circumstances surrounding us. Just as we have deregulated the economy so that firms and businesses can deal with changing conditions, the long run trend in US family policy has been to deregulate the marriage market, and the book of rules governing who can get married or divorced where and when, has become much thinner. Yet much of the current political debate is precisely about re-regulating marriage. Our concern is that this re-regulation may actually be a force undermining the dynamic institution that is the modern US family.

from a union of production to a union of consumption