Browsing: Economics

Why do investors prefer to put their money to work at home?

Luca Cerabona via Flickr You’ve been waiting for today for weeks. You paid more than you could really afford for tickets to a football game, and the day is finally here. But when you look outside your window early Sunday morning, you realize you’d rather not go. It’s snowing, it’s 20 degrees below zero, and […]

At this stage of the early 21st century, when transparency has evolved from buzzword to business principle, when it’s possible to track anything just about anywhere, you might think it would be a simple matter to choose some everyday product—a cup of coffee, say, or a pen—and trace the paths taken by its parts […]

It’s well-known that statistics is a deceptively difficult topic to understand—at least, it’s well-known among people who’ve had some training about those deceptive difficulties. One concept, though, that seems to penetrate the barriers to statistical understanding is the normal distribution, the standard bell curve. Even if people don’t have the mathematical language to describe it, […]

Past disasters help us prepare—and make us pay attention.