Category Archives: Uncategorized

Around the hustle and bustle of the end-of-year holidays, I sometimes reflect on  how many of us put considerable time and energy into thinking about where to live and furnishing our home–but then rush off and travel to other place to vacation, celebrate, and meet with friends. Back in 1750, Samuel Johnson wrote in theContinue reading “"To be Happy at Home is the Ultimate Result of All Ambition"”

Charles Dickens wrote what has become one of the iconic stories of Christmas day and Christmas spirit in A Christmas Carol. But of course, the experiences of Ebenezer Scrooge are a story, not a piece of reporting. Here’s a piece by Dickens written for the weekly journal Household Words that he edited from 1850 to 1859. It’s from theContinue reading “Charles Dickens on Seeing the Poor”

There’s a sort of parlor game that the economically-minded sometimes play around the Christmas holiday, related to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Was Dickens writing his story as an attack on economics, capitalism, and selfishness? After all, his depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with his use of phrases like “decrease the surplus population” and “aContinue reading “Charles Dickens on Management vs. Labor”

The holiday season is full of resource consumption for gifts, food, decorations, entertainment, and travel. In that context, the environmental tradeoffs between either a real or an artificial Christmas tree are not actually of much importance. But for the more curious and/or obsessive readers of my wandering thoughts at this blog, the American Christmas TreeContinue reading “Real vs. Artificial Christmas Trees: Comparing Environmental Effects”

In certain locations and among certain groups, participation in the labor force is low. Can government-subsidized transitional jobs offer a method of getting more people connected to the labor force, in a way that persists after the government support is withdrawn or the transitional job comes to an end? A couple of years ago, theContinue reading “Subsidized Employment: Two Randomized US Studies”

Douglas Clement has one of his characteristically excellent interviews, this one with Lisa Cook, published in The Region from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (“Lisa Cook interview: On invention gaps, hate-related violence, discrimination, and more,” December 11, 2018).  From Clement’s prelude to the interview: “In the late 1980s, Lisa Cook arrived in Dakar, Senegal, toContinue reading “Interview with Lisa Cook: Invention Gaps, Anonymous Patents, and More”

The most obvious reason for the Earned Income Tax Credit is to raise the level of household income for poor and near-poor workers. A secondary reason is to encourage such workers to enter the workforce and remain connected to jobs. But there’s another potential benefit as well. Jacob Bastian Katherine Michelmore consider “The Long-Term ImpactContinue reading “Can the Earned Income Tax Credit (Mostly) Pay for Itself?”

Back in December 1968, an ecologist and microbiologist named Garrett Hardin published a short essay called “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science (December 13, 1968, pp. 1243-1248).  The phrase “tragedy of the commons” passed into everyday use, and the article itself spawned a vast research literature. Fifty years later, what’s it all about? HereContinue reading “Tragedy of the Commons: 50 Years Later”

If carbon capture and storage was cheap and easy, it would be a technological fix for the issue of climate change. It’s not that simple, of course. But along with a range of other technologies and policies, carbon capture and storage can be part of the answer. In the Global Status of CCS 2018, theContinue reading “Is Carbon Capture and Storage on the Verge?”