Tag: Economics
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The Undercover Economist
This is an enjoyable book that explains the basics of how economics works, which is to say, how the world works. Mr. Harford doesn’t go into any technical detail at all, so there are no charts and graphs to decipher (although a very few are used for illustration), and there are no mathematical formulas.
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AirTran subsidy is harmful
From the beginning, we in the Wichita area have been told each year that the AirTran subsidy was intended as a temporary measure, that soon AirTran would be able to stand on its own, and there will be no need to continue the subsidy. Mayor Mayans said as much last year, and so did City…
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The Mystery of Capital
The problem with most third world countries, Mr. De Soto tells us, is not that there is no capital, it’s that the capital is dead. Dead in the sense that it can’t be used to its full economic potential. It can’t be mortgaged, it can’t be divided into shares, and it simply can’t be used…
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Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity
This is a wonderful book that can teach anyone what is important to know about economics. It teaches the insights that people can use to understand and evaluate the mechanism of our economy and government themselves. It is not a textbook with charts, graphs, and formulas. It requires no special prerequisite from the reader.
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Wal-Mart. More hypocrisy.
Currently it is quite fashionable to criticize Wal-Mart as the starting point for everything evil about American business. Critics allege that Wal-Mart earns too much profit, pays its employees too little, doesn’t provide its employees health insurance so they have to rely on the government, it exploits low-paid workers in China, and might even be…
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Hypocrisy over oil profits abounds
The recent swell of criticism over oil company “windfall” profits, some even coming from people who should know better, is truly remarkable in its hypocrisy.
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Employer-paid health insurance
A Harvard study (Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy) concluded that of families that declared bankruptcy, about half cited medical bills as the reason. Of those, 76% had medical insurance at the time they became sick. Some of the problem is that when people become seriously ill, they can’t work. After they lose their…
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Prices ration scarce goods
As the price for gasoline rises, politicians hear increased calls for regulation of gas prices. We hear news stories of hotels increasing prices for victims of hurricane Katrina, and prices for needed goods in the destructed area could rise, too.
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What to do about gasoline prices
Almost anything the government does in response to the recent high gasoline prices is bound to fail.
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Book Review: Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy
This book is a general introduction to economics written in a non-technical way. It provides excellent coverage of many introductory topics in economics, and you don’t have to be a mathematical sophisticate to understand it. It is very readable by anyone who is interested in this topic.
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I, Pencil
Do you think there exists a single person who knows how to make a lead pencil? In this article, Mr. Read shows us how there is no one who knows even a small fraction of what is necessary to produce even this simple, everyday item. How, then, does a lead pencil come to be manufactured?…
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The downside of Being the Air Cap
Mr. Clements’s article makes a striking conclusion as to why airfares in Wichita were so high. I would be curious as to whether any of our government leaders have read the study. We should also ask why our government leaders are not performing research like this when they propose to spend large sums of taxpayer…