It would be a stretch to call Tim Harford a household name, but for an economist, he comes close. In a long and varied career, he has presented a range of podcasts and radio shows, published several best-selling books, including The Undercover Economist and How to Make the World Add Up, and writes a regular Read More…
The Women’s Equality Party (WE) has voted overwhelmingly in favour of adopting an economic model created by the Oxford economist Kate Raworth.
Although the ever-increasing debt seems a distant otherworldly life, one day this eventuality will attach itself to every tax return, every monthly salary, and we will sigh, watching as 9% of our gross income slowly slips through our fingers.
In order to remain at university, we’re required to pass: nothing more, nothing less. With this most basic incentive, why would anyone sacrifice social or extra-curricular activities in order to come out with anything better than the lowest pass mark possible?
It might seem a little depressing to reduce something with so many individualities to a matter of costs and benefits, but in doing so we can perhaps explain why one language may be more likely to outlive another. If we say that the creator of a language (or the founder of a society’s particular communication system) is the fundamental policy-maker, what makes this particular policy successful in the long-term?
If coordination were possible, an agreement between all users to send fewer and higher-quality messages would generate the greatest benefit to the dating pool as a whole. That’s not to discourage some of the most disastrously bizarre Tinder messages, which have provided hours of entertainment to users and meme pages across the globe.
In an exam, we view the shift from one question to another as a loss of both time and effort, a perspective that ultimately outweighs the potential for gain. Economists would describe this as an inefficient allocation of our resources; we, unfortunately, do not seem to care.
Edmund Kelly writes about Oxford’s PPE degree.