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While the rich got richer, the poor stopped having children. High levels of student debt, weak income growth and elevated house prices discouraged young couples from starting a family. In the United Kingdom, the birth rate and housing market were inversely related: as house prices went up, the number of births fell.105 In parts of Europe worst affe

Edward Chancellor • The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest

Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. In a Wall Street Journal article in 1993, he stated that “no matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5 percent of GDP.” What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated.

The chart on this page, updating the ev... See more

W. Kurt Hauser • Hauser’s Law

Abundance

Derek Thompson

amazon.com

You can see the rate of growth of per capita median income slows down around 1973, which I take as the end of the era of low-hanging fruit. As an approximation, if median income had continued to grow at its earlier postwar rate, the median family income today would be over $90,000.

Tyler Cowen • The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better: A Penguin eSpecial from Dutton

Some of Cowen’s theories seem to misunderstand on a fundamental level why people do things at all. Use opportunity cost to your advantage, he enjoins his reader, by scheduling a call halfway through a movie; if you don’t have to reschedule, the film wasn’t worth finishing. Desserts deliver diminishing marginal returns after the first few bites; the... See more

archive.ph • Tyler Cowen, the Man Who Wants to Know Everything

Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University in Virginia, has termed the current period ‘the great stagnation’.

Ian Leslie • Curious

He called this period the “Great Stagnation”, and he proposed a cultural solution rather than an economic one: raise the social status of scientists

The way most historians describe this transformation is to say that the child went from “useful” to “protected.” But the sociologist Viviana Zelizer came up with a far more pungent phrase. She characterized the modern child as “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”

Jennifer Senior • All Joy and No Fun

providing a guaranteed basic income