Speaking of gambling…from a paper titled “Loving a bad bet: Factors that induce low-income individuals to purchase state lottery tickets,” presented at the 2008 American Economic Association annual meeting. According to the paper, despite state lotterys having the worst odds of any form of legalized gambling, “low income individuals spend a higher percentage of their [...]

I don’t pretend to understand what all the numbers on this US. National Debt Clock mean, but I will give you one impression I have: They don’t look good. Especially when you click on the snapshot below and see the numbers actually moving in one direction: up. For some perspective, however, look at the following [...]

More economic song parodies by Marcy Shaffer of the web site Versus: You’ve got the Fed (sung to the tune of “You’ve got a friend”) Lyrics: This is when. From your den. You call men. Who then all call Ben. Squeal you’re breakin’. You’re caught in the red. Too big to croak ’cause markets could [...]

A New York Time article called More Men Marrying Wealthier Women has attracted some fascinating comments on the paper’s web site. First, from the article: An analysis of census data to be released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that she and countless women like her are victims of a role reversal that is [...]

The Real-World Economics Review blog has nominated the following people for its Ignoble Prize for Economics, which will be awarded to three econoists “who contributed most to enabling the Global Financial Collapse.” Click on each name to read evidence of their culpability: * Alan Greenspan * Andre Zylberberg * Art Laffer * Assar Lindbeck * [...]

In case you missed it in our last post, it’s worth breaking out this chart of U.S. home prices since 1970, provided by the blog Bubble Meter. When you look at it now, it’s hard not to think “Of course there was a bubble!” (Just like when you look at my favorite long-term chart: The [...]

Since the country, in the form of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, is now officially delving into the causes of the financial collapse, it might be instructive to take a look back at who among the analysts and punditocracy thought the housing bubble — a precursor to the systemic implosion — wasn’t really a bubble [...]

From Ribbonfarm.com, a blog about “business and innovation,” written by Venkatesh Rao, who works at the Xerox Innovation Group. Rao has written two posts — “The Office According to ‘The Office’” and “Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk” — dissecting NBC’s hit sit-com “The Office” as “an interpretation of The Office as management science.”

“The Office” is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore…

Hugh MacLeod’s cartoon is a pitch-perfect symbol of an unorthodox school of management based on the axiom that organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs.

Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop…

There’s a school of thought out there that holds that the policies of the Fed and the Treasury, while perhaps preventing a full-blown economic depression, are sooner or later going to lead to massive inflation. Even if that’s true, one would hope the situation won’t spin as out of control as it has in hyperinflationary [...]

With jokes like “that’s like saying that tautologies are tautological,” not sure you’ll be seeing Yoram Bauman, Ph.D, aka The Stand-Up Economist, on Conan O’Brien (though Jay Leno may be willing to give him a whirl, at this point). In this video, he riffs on Greg Mankiw‘s classic textbook, Principles of Economics.