Videos
Podcasts
Blogs
Quizzes
GamesPosts Tagged: ‘economics’
The first — and fastest — answer to the question of why breadwinning is something male heads of households do is that it isn’t. Or at least it isn’t the case more than ever before, according to new data from the Pew Research Center that has reinvigorated old debates about women and work. Reported on in The New York Times, the Pew survey results found that women are the primary breadwinners in four in 10 American households with children under 18, the largest proportion in history…
Blow Your Mind: Keeping Kayfabe (with guest Colt Cabana)
by Robert Lamb | January 24, 2013
Kayfabe, for those of your not in the know, is the traditional carny code of pro-wrestling. In short, you can boil it all down to “don’t tell the fans how the magic works.” Or you wax philosophic and see it as A “Complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery.” That quote comes from economist and mathematician Eric Weinstein and as soon as we read it, we knew the time for pro-wrestling episode was upon us.
There’s this excellent recent analogy just sitting there staring us in the face as a perfectly good answer to the question of whether cutting or increasing spending is viable solution to our debt crisis that’s creating such acrimony among Congress and waffling from the president. Just a couple years after it first crashed, pretty much all economists point to a single factor that more than any other sealed the global financial fate into that of doomed: illiquidity.
What, exactly, just happened? Just how close did we come to the brink of financial disaster with the haggling over the debt ceiling? What would that disaster look like? And what was the big stinking problem with the negotiations; in other words, what took so long?
A lot better journalists than me have dedicated some very good ink to these questions concerning the raising of the federal debt limit.
The very neat and succinct blog Parapolitical took the opportunity provided by recent murmurs about the military coup that the Greek government could face as a result of failed austerity measures and a desire to stay in the European Union to highlight a study conducted in 2004 by Harvard Business researcher Dr. Catherine Duggan. In it, Duggan surveyed the economies of 27 nations following coups each experienced between 1980 and 1997. She found that foreign investors prefer right wing paramilitary coups over left wing paramilitary coups by a landslide.
It frightens and confuses me that the field of economics, a discipline that we as a nation put such thorough and abiding stock into to make large, sweeping decisions that affect everyone, like how to allocate health care among Americans or whether to undertake air strikes in a foreign country, is so uncertain a field that it is subject to politicization. Indeed, the very economist at whose feet one sits, whether it be Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, is nearly synonymous in the U.S. with which political party one is affiliated.
This episode of 60 Minutes opens with the following quote: “Unemployment improved a bit last month, but it is still nearly 9%. And the trouble is, job creation is so slow that it will be years before we get back the 7.5 million jobs lost in the great recession. American families have been falling out […]
If you watch the video and read the words in this article, it is incredibly depressing. We eat pineapples (and many other commodities like bananas, coffee beans, cocoa beans, etc.) without really thinking about or considering how they are produced. But if you go behind the scenes, you discover a human and chemical disaster: True […]
Millions of Americans are about to face economic disaster and homelessness as their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits run out…
Last week in an interview with Tony Robbins on SYSK, Robbins made this statement:
SYSK is Motivated to Speak with Tony Robbins
the biggest concern I have in our society today, and it’s a new occurrence and it’s happened just in the last few years. We’ve seen this incredible shift where for the first time in American history, at least in a hundred years of American history, human beings in America, and it’s not just in America, it’s Europe as well, but human beings are starting now to believe, as a majority of Americans, that the quality of their life and the quality of their children’s life in the future is gonna be worse than the past.
(BTW, his show if available on Hulu)
That thought got stuck in my head. And then it was repeated today in an article in the WSJ…
Recent Postings by Category
BrainStuff
- Thank You and Best Wishes to Marshall Brain
- Contest – Design a $300 house and win $25,000
- How the Philtrum works – the place under your nose where your face comes together
The Coolest Stuff on the Planet
Keep Asking
- Why can a 5 foot 8 inch man dunk a basketball on a 10 foot rim while some people of taller stature can’t?
- What happens to our sun once it runs out of fuel?
- How do we know the age of the universe?
Stuff Mom Never Told You
- 237 Reasons Humans Have Sex
- The Wedding Ring Phenomenon
- How 1951 Miss America Sparked the Miss USA Pageant
Stuff to Blow Your Mind
- Blow Your Mind: Slay Your Paper Tigers
- Space Religion: Cao Dai and the 72 Inhabited Exoplanets
- Blow the Mind: Objects of Love
Stuff You Should Know
- “In The Neighborhood” by Jon Stewart Mosman
- “Thanatos” by Christopher Vincola
- “Frame Story” by Adam Pracht
The Stuff of Genius
CarStuff
- Show Notes: Heart-stopping Last Laps of Racing
- Never say Never: Jaguar XJ220 Spotted in the Wild!
- What’s your pick for the 2013 Indianapolis 500 pace car?
How-to Stuff
PopStuff
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 152: Final Episodes
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 151: Mailbag!
- PopStuff Show Notes: Episode 150: Barbie!
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know
Stuff to Change the World
- Who will own the Arctic?
- Obesity: The New Global Crisis
- Bill Gates Makes For A Pretty Decent Cartoon
Stuff You Missed in History Class
- Missed in History: Irish Potato Famine, Part 1
- Missed in History: Paul Poiret
- Missed in History: Benjamin Banneker
