Ask an Economist
Would the transition be better if I pursued pure mathematics instead, because my experiences has been lately in proof making? What can I look forward to? How and what should I be looking into, to start off, if economics is a good choice? I am a highly curious person. Plus, I have worked hard, I have been doing pure mathematics on my own since 2004 until presently; but, it has been slow going; so, I thought that by going into something that has a better return in investments of my intellectual energy, I should try microeconomics?
The prospect of a mid-life career change would be daunting for anyone. In the end, you’ll have to make that difficult decision on your own. But I can give you a few tips on how you might begin to explore whether a career in economics...
After about a month when the commodity has less than 2 weeks of shelf life it may be sold at .69/lb and then discarded after another week.
1) Why would the store not further discount these items at let's say .30/lb to clear the complete stock? ( I understand it is so as not to let the global/US prices of the commodity go down.)
2) Is wasting better for the store than to sell it at a discount?
3) Even if customers stop buying fresh commodity and start to wait until the price goes down to .30/lb. Isn't it economically profitable to the store to actually sell it than waste it ?
Thanks
Food waste arises from preferences, incentives, and constraints. Retailers have time and other resource constraints which implies that it simply will not be worth it to sell every last item of food in every instance. It can be said that there is...
Okay, so this is going to be a really stupid question but I need to know the answer to this. There is a message board about collecting video games and we got into a argument about the definition of the word "rarity." With these games, we all know the exact amount of copies printed for each title. Say Game A has 2000 copies printed and Game B has 5000 copies printed. Assuming that no copies are lost or destroyed, Game A will always be rarer, correct? Someone else is arguing that the availability of copies on the secondary market changes this.
If Game A has 20 copies available on the marketplace right now and Game B only has 2 copies, would Game B be considered to be rarer overall? At that moment in time, sure, but overall, I would say no. Is either of us correct? Would the monetary value of the game on the secondary market change the definition of rarity? Thanks for your time!
In the strictest (or standard) sense of the word, you would be correct that game A is “rarer,” given that there are fewer of these in existence than game B. However, the other person is not totally wrong because, in the words of economists, the “...
When the Fed raises interest rates, it raises the cost of borrowing by firms which raises their cost of doing business. That induces firms to hire less, delay or eliminate capacity expansions, etc. This is why it is not a good idea for...
Economists start from the presumption that producers want to maximize their profits, and are not running a business to promote social welfare or social justice. If a producer can sell 1 unit of a good to Mr. A for $10, he would always prefer to...
The sudden and persistent drop in labor force participation that began with the pandemic has been called the Great Resignation. The labor force fell by 3.2 percentage points at the beginning of the pandemic (Figure 1), but almost immediately...
For example, I am looking at the MRTS of good b for a. Thus, MRTS = marginal product of a / marginal product of b.
Let's say that good a is very productive with a high marginal product, while good b is unproductive and has a low marginal product. This means that the MRTS of good b for a is very high. Thus, a lot of input a must be reduced for a 1 unit increase in input b, to maintain the same level of output.
This conclusion does not make sense to me since I thought that input a was very productive. How come when we increase the unproductive input by 1 unit, we have to reduce a lot of the productive input in order to maintain the same level of output?
The question is based on the definition of the MRTS of B for A as the (the amount of input A)/(the amount of input B), which is flipping the numerator and the denominator of the correct definition, probably because of the definition of...
Steady-state level of output per worker is roughly the same as per capita income in the long run. There is nothing good or bad about it, except countries and their residents enjoy higher standards of living in a material sense if the per capita...
There are several statistical reasons why you would covert the variable into a logarithm. Logarithm transformation, for example, can change a highly skewed variable into a more normalized distribution. It is also useful when you wish to linearize...
Standard theory describes channels through which raising rates affects both demand and supply. Higher rates raise the opportunity cost of spending and thus tend to dampen both business investment and household consumption. All else...
I should be clear that economics cannot provide an answer, but it can help us to organize our thoughts about an answer. The economic concept that is most helpful in thinking about this question is "opportunity cost." That is, the best way to...
Interesting idea. As you note, the idea is extreme, but it addresses some of the underlying causes of high healthcare prices.
Your reasoning likely was that cost reduction for the healthcare providers would lead to price...
You ask, “Is it moral to have their customers pay” by raising prices? Well, let’s ask it this way. Assuming the quality of the product increases because of the investment in the new technology, are customers willing to pay higher prices after the...
I chose the answer that said "Accounting profit is greater than economic profit" because I am under the assumption that there is always an opportunity cost no matter the situation ("No Free Lunch"). However, when I got my test results back, I found that the supposedly correct answer is "Accounting profit is greater than or equal to economic profit." When I asked my teacher about this question, he said that hypothetically in economics there are situations with no opportunity cost.
So my question is: What do you think is the correct answer to this question? In economics, is there ever theoretically a situation where there is no opportunity cost?
Great question. First off, when we’re talking about a firm, be careful with what you label economic (or opportunity) costs: they are the sum of implicit and explicit costs. Accounting and economic cost both consider explicit costs (things like...
You are correct in observing that efforts to limit competition have the potential to produce market outcomes that diverge from the "free market ideal" that economists commonly use as their baseline of comparison. Indeed the desirable properties...
I know you are asking this out of intellectual curiosity and for fun; in the U.S., it is illegal to create any sort of currency. Having said that, you raise an important point. It is easy to "create money" by printing some pieces of paper and,...
Interesting question. The Braves defeated the Dodgers on Oct. 20 (2021) to take a 3-1 game lead in the National League Championship Series and are now just one game away from the World Series. Liberty Media Corporation is an American mass media...
On top of this strange confidentiality of the index, as well as the surprise at "no resource scarcity, we're actually improving", I have a few other reservations.
What it says about resources being virtually unlimited leads me to compare it with that math paradox of the arrow that always covers half of the remaining distance, infinitely, instead of touching the target -the Earth being limited, at some point I think we'd run out even if we optimized our consumption to the molecular level. It also takes into account the richest 10% when trying to show that the average work time needed to buy some basic items across the world has lessened, so we're going better with a bigger population, which doesn't look fair. I also know that among animals, large populations collapse after a while due to lack of resources -but they say it doesn't account for humans resourcefulness (could be a "not for us" bias, but could also be relevant).
Your observation about the lack of material on the Simon Abundance Index is a valid one. Perhaps its newness accounts for a general lack of peer-reviewed material on the subject.
The Simon Abundance Index emanates from the ideas and work...
There are very few places to find county-level farm rental rate information. Iowa State has conducted a long-running survey on farm rental rates. That data is provided in the ISU Cash Rental Rate Map (...
Small business owners who most effectively use economics knowledge to the advantage of their business do so through the lens of unit economics. What are the per-unit expenses of the business and how do those expenses compare to revenues per unit...
John Green, Nicole Swepson, and I recently completed a paper, College Quality as Revealed by Willingness-to-Pay for College Graduates, that addresses this question. First, we examined the correlation between traditional measures of...
You can do a lot of different things with an economics degree so it's a bit of a tough question to answer. Of course, one thing you can do is be an economist. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has an overview of what that kind of position entails...
A seller has market power if it is able to PROFITABLY price higher than the competitive price because it has a downward sloping demand curve and sets its output where marginal revenue equals marginal cost but sets its price above its marginal...
There seems to be two questions here.
- For a couple with kids and highly unequal incomes, what is the best way to make expenditure decisions? (Do both individuals get equal votes? Would that be unfair to the higher-earning individual...
Let's recall that inflation is usually computed as a year-on-year (annual) percentage change in the consumer price index. Therefore, CPI inflation for June 2021 will compare the CPI in June 2021 to the CPI in June 2020. Hence, inflation of say 6....
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