Category: Money

I read about an interesting technique for people to transfer money in less developed countries. Let’s say that you live in the big city, a hundred miles away from your parents. You want to send them some money but there is no bank where they live. Recently, though, somebody in your parent’s village got a…

The basic idea behind capitalism as an underpinning of society is that if you give people the freedom to earn a lot of money however they please, society will tend to get better. They will get better because the best way to earn a lot of money is to sell something which lots of people…

Almost six months later, I’ll look back at my earlier post about financial complexity. Considering the continuing troubles of the financial markets, it seems clear that I underestimated the degree of the problem. But I think I was generally correct in pointing out that the complexity of modern markets helped hide the nature of the…

A friend of mine who has been working for many years in an area that is now known as social entrepreneurship commented that there is no good economic model for it (he thinks of things like this because he went to business school). This led me to think about economic models for charitable giving. Economists…

According to the U.S. census, median household income in the U.S. has not changed much since 1998. The economy does continue to expand. What is happening is that the richer households are absorbing all the gains, leading to increased inequality. I’ve commented before on whether or not this matters. I’ve now seen a couple of…