Stand-Up Economist

As seen on Comedy Central The PBS News Hour with Jim Lehrer!

Economics rss

What is (and isn't) funny about economics

  • Interesting articles

    Posted 9/09/09

    West Coast fishermen embark on new wave of fishing, including discussion of ITQs.
    Chicha! (It’s a traditional Latin American beer—I had it in Ecuador—where the fermentation process is kicked off by chewing corn and then spitting it out to ferment :)
    Summer of Work Exposes Medical Students to System’s Ills, a thought-provoking article in the [...]

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  • A must-read for hippies

    Posted 8/31/09

    Hippies (and everyone else) should read Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Green like me” in the New Yorker. The author of a great book on climate change called Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert reviews the book No Impact Man by Colin Beavan (in which he spends a year trying to “go green”, e.g., by doing without toilet [...]

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  • Fuchs on health care, the public option, and adverse selection

    Posted 8/21/09

    A great overview of the issues, as noted by Richard Thaler.

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  • Remembering the Google IPO

    Posted 8/20/09

    A neat post about the 5th anniversary of Google’s IPO (Initial Public Offering), which used an auction mechanism to sell shares. The original price of $85 seemed outrageous at the time… but the stock is now selling for $445. A good reminder of the efficient market hypothesis!
    PS. Another auction story, this one a bit [...]

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  • Stand-Up Economics: The Micro Textbook

    Posted 8/19/09

    To coincide with the release of The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, I’m working on updates of a (free!) companion micro textbook. Here are the latest versions of the textbook: basic and with calculus.

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  • Greg Mankiw on carbon

    Posted 8/19/09

    Read it here. Also interesting is Steven Landsburg’s response here.

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  • Adverse selection and unemployment insurance: Bad news

    Posted 8/19/09

    The NY Times reports the (economically) obvious: there’s no private market for unemployment insurance. The problem, of course, is adverse selection: Individuals know much more than insurers about their risk of being laid off, and only those at high risk will seek coverage.
    PS. A terrific read here is Martin Feldstein’s presidential address to the American [...]

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  • The $500,000 hot dog

    Posted 8/19/09

    How much would you pay to have the exclusive license to sell hot dogs outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY City? Slate reports that the city auctions off the rights… for almost half a million dollars per year!

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  • My redesigned website… and my 1/2-LTE in The Economist

    Posted 8/06/09

    Just in time for my Letter to the Editor that was half-published in The Economist (click “more” to see the full LTE), I’ve got a newly redesigned website, courtesy of Outward Focus Design. I hope you like it, and please email me if you find any problems! [more]

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  • Cake-cutting in the NFL

    Posted 7/28/09

    Here’s a neat article about using auctions in NFL overtime.

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