Economics

The degrowth movement wants to intentionally shrink the economy to address climate change, and create lives with less stuff, less work, and better well-being. This new accounting of economic success would focus on access to public services, a shorter work week, and an increase in leisure time. But is it a utopian fantasy?

The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age. For a half-century, those working for hourly wages have won almost no real gains. The real average hourly wage in 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation was $22.65 in 2018, compared with $20.27 in 1964 — just an 11.7% gain.

Kentucky’s plan to bring broadband to remote parts of the state has sputtered and its future looks increasingly bleak. State leaders told rural residents it would create better business opportunities. But instead, they keep getting left behind.

Global Financial Integrity (GFI) analysts have identified a global trade ‘value gap’ of $8.8 trillion between what states declare as the value of trades with other countries – and what their trade partners declare for the same deals.

The rise of hustle culture is often attributed to millennials, but when it comes to grinding in the gig economy these days, Boomers are leading the way. According to Uber, 25 percent of its millions of workers are over 50, with more drivers over 50 than under 30. Meanwhile, Boomer homeowners are the fastest growing demographic for Airbnb.

Politicians are floating the idea that the economy supersedes the needs of living, breathing human beings; cruise and airline companies are demanding bailouts and full control over the terms; senators are doing crimes in broad daylight; and billionaire corporatists who did the same are asking regular people for money.

Last year billionaire Sun Hongbin quietly transferred $4.5bn worth of shares in his Chinese real estate firm to a company on a street corner in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Thanks to its relish for deregulation, the state is fast becoming the most profitable place for the mega-wealthy to park their billions.

Operating in cash costs countries about 0.5% of their GDP every year. But cost isn’t the only incentive to move towards a cashless future. Many countries are going cashless at great speed. What are the advantages of ditching hard cash and what are the dangers?

There was nothing charming about what the British built. It wasn’t meant to protect anything except imperial revenue. It grew along the Inland Customs Line, a bureaucratic barrier that the British created to impose a high salt tax on the people living on one side of the line—the relatively saltless one.

Once the seat of the roman empire, it is now home to a surprisingly robust yet temperamental economy. The economy of Italy followed a path very similar to that of Germany’s all be it with a little more flamboyancy which has found them where they are today.

A prominent housing analyst expects hundreds of thousands of defaults next year as mortgage forbearance periods end. At first glance, those projections look bad. On closer inspection, however, this round of foreclosures should be mild in comparison to the financial carnage of 2008 to 2010.

Increase your output, get paid more. Wages go up with productivity. Until, it turns out, they don’t anymore. The unwinding of this agreement in recent decades, such that workers must continue to produce more without expecting it to show up in their pay stubs, has now been the subject of a good deal of discussion and debate.

Just one per cent of Sweden’s GDP circulates as cash. As debates over the need for cash rage along lines of age, wealth and location, the country is looking to create a digital currency.

Walmart has an incentive to become the place people think about when they think of their financial future. Inside Walmart’s curious, possibly ingenious effort to get customers to build up their savings accounts.

The major chains — AMC, Regal Entertainment and Cinemark — no longer rely on teenage ushers to keep the floors from getting sticky. Instead, they have turned to a vast immigrant workforce, often hired through layers of subcontractors. That arrangement makes it almost impossible for janitors to make a living wage.

Despite Ontario’s recent minimum wage increase, workers are still struggling to make ends meet. Even for those who have full-time jobs, earning minimum wage means they have to make a lot of difficult choices.

The current Boeing 737s, the world’s most flown craft, are all longer than the original by up to 45 feet. And yet, on the inside, we’re getting squeezed. That’s because more space doesn’t equal more space in Airline World. It equals more seats—and typically less room per person.

If you have ever traveled somewhere, especially to countries that are either a good deal richer or poorer than your own, you might have noticed that some places are certainly a lot more expensive than others. There seems to be a strong correlation between the average wealth of a country and the cost of goods and services.

How well-meaning donations end up fuelling an unproven, virtually unregulated two-billion-dollar stem-cell industry. An industry has sprung up in which specialized clinics offer miracle remedies from poorly understood stem-cell products.

A limit would help to slow the growth of economic inequality and prevent reckless risk-taking by CEOs who otherwise might feel motivated to try to drive up the stock price of their company and therefore their bonus.

One of the most important economic stories of the past couple of decades is the rise of economic inequality in the United States and around the world. Since 1980, economists say, wage growth for the highest-paid workers has been roughly triple that for the lowest paid. In some cities, the disparity is wider.

A recession is no picnic. A financial crisis leaves wounds that last for decades. A pandemic, though, can sow a unique kind of chaos. The rich got even richer after the Great Recession, but the Great Depression changed the social order.

The decoy effect is defined as the phenomenon whereby consumers change their preference between two options when presented with a third option – the “decoy” – that is “asymmetrically dominated”. It is also referred to as the “attraction effect” or “asymmetric dominance effect”.