economics

The first supermarket opened in 1930. The traditional way of purchasing food was to walk from your butcher, who served you from behind a counter, to the bakery, who served you from behind a counter, to a produce stand, who took your order. Combining everything under one roof and making customers pick it from the shelves themselves was a way to make

The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is being able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long-term growth.

“The world consumes about 100mm bbl/day of crude oil, but for the entire world to enjoy the U.S. standard of living would require the equivalent of about 300-400mm bbl”. His stats are about right, but his ‘no’ answer when Joe asked whether nuclear could make up that gap was dead wrong. And that’s the real story of the century that nobody is even

“They need to like you.”

Postan rejected a monetarist explanation of long-term price movements during the Middle Ages and firmly asserted the primacy of the demographic factor (Hilton 1985).

Intrinsic pricing power is created when price is not the most important factor in a customer’s purchase decision.

When two closed systems are brought into communication to form a single open system the second law of thermodynamics forces energy to disperse. In Fig. 7, the pressure differential forces water to flow from the full tank into the empty tank. In economics, we would call this arbitrage. Both represent an open systemmoving toward its lowenergy

Since that is the case, any sovereign borrowing strategy that does not implicitly assume a fairly neutral position about the direction of credit spreads can involve a significant increase in volatility—and hence in the probability of distress.

Electricity becoming a “willing servant”—introducing washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and refrigerators—freed up hours of household labor in a way that let female workforce participation rise.