Hard Work (Alone) Won’t Get Your Country Out of Poverty

Work is a determining factor for personal success and social development. Furthermore, there is a socially accepted mantra around work that surrounds it with an aura of mysticism. It is said that hard work is what drives a person, and therefore a whole country. Is this true? This article tries to explain why the idea of hard work as the only determinant for development is incomplete. Work alone does not achieve the economic development desired by all.

Jorge Eduardo García is currently completing the fourth year of a degree in Economics with a specialization in Financ

Boom-Bust Cycles and Easy Money

Only a few months ago most economic commentators were sanguine about prospects for the US economy. Most of them did not expect an imminent downturn. Now all that has changed with most experts expecting the economy to enter a downward phase of the economic cycle by 2019. According to experts, the key factor behind the emerging downturn is the policies of the US President Trump in particular the imposition of tariffs on imports. Very few analysts however attribute the possible downturn to the decline in the annual growth rate of money supply.

State Secrets and the National Security State

Inadvertently released federal documents reveal that U.S. officials have apparently secured a secret indictment against Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks who released secret information about the internal workings of the U.S. national-security establishment. In any nation whose government is founded on the concept of a national-security state, that is a cardinal sin, one akin to treason and meriting severe punishment.

No, Dollar Stores Don’t Create Poverty

American journalists seem mired in fantasy worlds, at least where it comes to economic analysis, and perhaps we see no greater show of ignorance than in the discussion of the presence of businesses in the poorest areas of inner cities. Time and again, pundits make the specious claim that people in cities are poor because of the presence of small businesses, such as groceries owned by Korean immigrants .

Randomized Controlled Trials and Economic Questions

The Austrians have long argued that equilibrium models of economic phenomena cannot capture the causal, realistic aspect of human behavior. ”All things are subject to the law of cause and effect,” says Menger in the famous opening line of his Principles of Economics. Formal economic models, in contrast, typically depict systems of equations in which each variable simultaneously determines the values of the other variables. 

California Housing Funk Crosses Border to Nevada

Las Vegas survives on visitors and immigrants. The housing market depends upon those escaping California taxes and regulation with thousands in home equity to bid up home prices in Nevada, in general, and Las Vegas, specifically.

The actual numbers, provided by WolfeStreet.com, are; 47,500 Californians moved to Nevada in 2017, while 23,800 Nevadans moved to the golden state. That’s a net 23,700 inflow from California or roughly 2,000 per month last year.

Why this matters is, as builder Toll Brothers indicated in a recent earnings call,