Category: Economics

Many years ago, I traveled with my parents back to the Land of Corn to visit relatives. While there, we stopped by the house of an older couple. While my dad talked with the husband about guns (one of the least interesting subjects in existence, IMHO), I took a look at the man’s bookshelf and […]

My first year in college, I lived on campus, and one of my friends in the apartment stairwell went out and spent $1,300 on a sound system for his junk ass car. It made me angry because I couldn’t believe so much money could be spent on something so unnecessary, but only years later would […]

I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I would someday like to complete a masters degree. The subjects I prefer to study are not practical, likely will not make a dramatic impact on the world, and are not especially lucrative, but I simply can’t get over the fact that I […]

I used to think that knowledge was unilateral and could be acquired primarily through books. This was instilled in me by the education system, and only once I was out of the education system did it become much more apparent that books can only confer a very specific kind of knowledge. If you traveled the […]

Strong preferences can severely limit your opportunities to save money, but a special form of this – perfectionism – has even greater power to limit these opportunities. I would not describe myself as a perfectionist, per se, but I have some “perfection-istic” dispositions, and one of those is in relation to my car. For the […]

When considering assets and capital, we tend to group things based on their general characteristics, and we name these groups by what we call “class”. So when talking about investments, we break them down into “asset classes”, often real estate, stocks, bonds, or commodities, and this makes it easier to talk about these things based […]

For the past year or so, it’s occurred to me that people at the lowest income levels are usually getting screwed by most policies. Not only is there very little money left over after expenses for things like contributions to a 401(k), but the tax incentives are almost nil for that anyway. Prices skew toward […]

I’m not yet ready to commit myself to any serious study of macroeconomics: it’s simply too large of a field, with too many interconnecting pieces. I don’t know that my interests will actually help me go very deep here. But I think thought games can do a great deal to help anybody think clearly about […]

As a kid, half my life was spent thirsting for the next toy or video game. I could occasionally save up my allowance to buy nice or expensive things, but I would often have to rely on the luck of Christmas or my birthday for the those much more expensive things, especially video game consoles. […]