Good Economics for Hard Times

Despite what Karl Marx had to say, labor is no ordinary commodity.

It is easy to see how we may get trapped by these strategies. We don’t like to think of ourselves as racists; hence, if we have negative thoughts about others, it is tempting to rationalize our behavior by blaming them. The more we can persuade ourselves migrants are to blame for bringing their children with them, the less we worry about the childr

It is in pursuit of these ratings that they are selling you the socks or the toy for an absurdly low price. Their hope is that one day they will have ratings both numerous and high enough that they can name their price.

was the first to show the supply-demand model might not directly apply to immigration.

In other words, people seemed to act as if they had multiple personalities, each with different preferences. The context picks the personality that gets to decide in a particular situation. In the Swiss experiment, the context was whether or not the person saw himself as a banker, but in life it is often the people we are with, the schools we went

That does not mean the workers in the United States must necessarily end up worse off. This is because, as Samuelson showed in a later paper, the fact that free trade raises GNP means there is more to go around for everybody, and therefore even workers in the United States can be made better off if society taxes the winners from free trade and dist

Most people don’t like dealing with the unknown unknowns, and will go to great lengths to avoid making decisions in cases where they do not know the exact contours of the problem.

The most effective way to combat prejudice may not be to directly engage with people’s views, natural as that might seem. Instead, it may be to convince citizens it is worth their while to engage with other policy issues.

no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t