Optimizing Government Rebates

The government has decided to put out a stimulus package and give people “tax rebates” in the hopes people will spend the money and jump-start the economy. An individual can get around $600 in rebates in the form of a government check that can be deposited into a bank account and then spent as [...]

Economic Apocalypse Now

The NYT writes…
…Almost everything seems to be going wrong for the American economy at once. People are buying less, but most things are costing more. Mortgage rates are rising, the dollar is falling and prices of key commodities like oil are leaping from one record high to the next.
On Thursday, the dollar plumbed new [...]

SIEPR Economic Summit

I was over at the SIEPR Economic Summit on Friday and ran into Craig Newmark (Craigslist, there as panelist) and Meg Whitman (former CEO, eBay, just attending) right after I walked in the door. Also there were: Larry Summers (ex-Harvard president and Clinton-era Secretary of the Treasury), Steven Chu (Nobel prize, Physics, Berkeley), [...]

Gas Prices

I happened upon this picture I took back in 1999 the other day. So almost exactly 9 years ago, a gallon of regular could be had for about 85 cents in Colorado. Admittedly, even back in 1999 that was cheap, which is the reason I took this picture in the first place. [...]

Predictably Irrational

…is a new book by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT. The New York Times has an interesting article on his book and its main thesis, that it is more often than not irrational to keep all our options open. Ariely advocates eliminating some of those options as they often consume an [...]