Category: Economics

It’s been about 6 years since I bought my couch. When I first moved away from my parents and into my own apartment, I went to a nice furniture store and found it. It was so comfortable that the first time I sat down on that model in the showroom, I knew it was very […]

In preparation for my trip to Nepal this past month, I received quite the course of vaccinations, which I mostly arranged at my local Walgreens. Highest on the list was hepatitis A, which is a concern in Nepal but not something people are typically vaccinated against here in the mothership, as well as typhoid, Tdap […]

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 […]