Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedoooooooooom…or, not quite

September 21, 2014

  Well, it’s over. The people of Scotland (whom, I’ve been told by numerous English teachers, are to be referred as ‘Scots’… but to whom one of the most learned Economists ever – John Kenneth Galbraith – correctly...

Foundation

September 3, 2014

A somewhat rambling thought here initially. I would expect most people my age entering ‘foundation’ as a search term would get lots of references to the most famous science fiction works of all times, Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’ series....

“Get me an economist octopus…”

August 19, 2014

Harry Truman famously once said that he wished he had a one-armed economist because he could never get a straight answer from any of them – they were always going on about “…on the one hand…” Upon returning to school this August I was...

Economics by walking around…

May 26, 2014

Lady Bell and I were walking home from the gym one fine Saturday afternoon; the same 1,200 metres as always. Suddenly, Bell had her camera out and was pulling me across the road and then having me pose on some abandoned sofas. She snapped the shots of undersigned you...

Salt of the earth…

April 29, 2014

One of the key ways I try to start young economists in writing a viable research question for an EE in economics is for them to find two or three seemingly random variables and see if we can link them to each other causally using economic theory. For example, might...

Price discrimination – in more ways than one

April 11, 2014

In all matters dealing with economics and the method of applying economic thought, great care should be taken to disambiguate terms and concepts. This means to remove all possible alternative meanings other than one. In other words, one needs to carefully define terms...