Why I Love Google Translate
Google Translate makes investing in international markets, emerging or otherwise, easier than ever. If you are looking at a company website or a foreign-language news source, you can copy the URL, go to Google Translate and paste it in the box, set the source and translation language, and bingo! You have a reasonable translation of [...]
Two Fun Classroom Experiments
I like to work some in-class exercises into my courses for two reasons: they help students think of material in a new way while breaking up the monotony of a lecture course. There are several of these online and in a journal called The Journal of Economics Education. I’m always looking for something new and [...]
A Low-Cost Way to Help Families
Like almost every woman with a college degree, I read Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article on women, families, and careers. I agree with a lot of it, too. One part jumped out at me, in part because I was thinking of writing a blog post about it anyway: Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women [...]
Defending the Penny
John Green is a great guy. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him, and he is really smart and really clever. His books are wonderful, and he deserves all of the success that he has had. But John Green and I disagree on one thing: the penny. John Green hates pennies. I love them. I [...]
Repurposing a Shooting Gallery
This is the bar at the Sandy Chanty, a restaurant at Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio. Geneva-on-the-Lake is an old lakefront resort, and the strip is filled with a lot of really old-style amusement businesses. The bar itself is a former shooting gallery built for Coney Island and moved to Geneva-on-the-Lake. The building stands, but the business in [...]
Don’t Buy Cell Phone Insurance
Here’s some easy money-saving advice: don’t buy cell phone insurance. Instead, hang on to your old phone, and have service switched to that if something happens to the new one. As an added bonus, certain members of your household may be so mortified by the phone they are stuck carrying that they will learn to [...]
What’s Happening in India?
The Wall Street Journal recently published an essay about India that asks why the country isn’t growing faster. The author is Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, and he blames the political system. These connect to the two obvious issues, corruption and low literacy. India should be an economic giant. It has diverse national [...]
