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In 2005,Valerie A. Ramey and Neville Francis authored a paper entitled A Century of Work and Leisure. In it, they look at work and leisure trends in the twentieth century. They conclude that some 70 percent of the decline in hours worked has been offset by an increase in hours spent in school. Further, contrary [...]

New York Times Science writer John Tierney writes about how there are interesting patterns of brain activity that can predict whether or not you will spend money on something or not, leading scientists to develop the Tightwad-Spendthrift scale.
It seems that neither tightwads nor spendthrifts fit what economists have lazily described as “rational actors”. It seems [...]

The Washington Post today is running an article on how the US has slipped from first to sixth place in annual rankings from the World Economic Forum. First, Second, Third and Fourth place are taken by Nordic countries; Switzerland, Finland, Sweden and Denmark respectively.
As the article says:
…the reason the Nordic countries score higher in the [...]

In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an article in Science entitled “The Tragedy of the Commons”, which built upon ideas originally developed by William Forster Lloyd in a parable published in 1833 in his book on population. Over the intervening half century, Garret’s metaphor has been widely misunderstood, largely as a result of people who have [...]

Frugality has nothing to do with economic thought, regardless of what we have been taught; from Adam Smith calling the frugal the genuine economic man and being promoted by Weber as the protestant driver of early capitalism. Frugality has been, and is, a non-economic tenet of any philosophy, Eastern or Western, that considers the ‘good life’.