EconoGIST

This edition of Deciphering Data brings you the answers to all these pressing questions and more: 

• At what time of year do most break-ups happen?
• Why are tiger-moms a thing in the US and China? 
• How do different people around the world think success happens?

The rise of American affluence gave us the luxury of choice and ability to be picky about what we like. Combined with newly formed marketing and advertising industries, consumer preferences developed that made perfect substitutes an economic unicorn. (If you don't know what a perfect substitute is, no worries, read on!)

Indifference curves are not graphs of who cares less, rather, they show different combinations of goods that can give a person a certain level of utility, or well-being. 

Do middleman apps make our lives better? What about the lives of their employees? Do Uber-like services improve consumer welfare? How do recessions affect birth rates? Why does the US have relatively high infant mortality? 

Find the answers to all these questions and more. 

Does this man look like he is substituting or complementing these apples? Trick question: apples are inanimate, and can't be complimented. 

The best data visualizations from around the web. Learn about online dating, music tastes, political preferences, violence, and earthquakes. 

Count von Count is never wrong, because he loves numbers! 

Did you know that higher gas prices might be better for us all? Industrialism is great, but creates negative externalities, such as pollution. Pigovian taxes reduce negative externalities and aim to also reduce distortionary taxes, like income tax. Win-win!

Don't be like this guy and let your money sit in the bank. Start investing with some simple tips!

Regulation in the last few years has made the stock market much less profitable, much to the chagrin of finance professionals (such as the pictured men). Is this a good or bad thing? To answer, we must decide who the stock market exists for. 

How is Noble award winning economist Robert Lucas similar to the philosopher Hegel? Both recogonized that policy and theory are intrinsically rooted in their time. 

When you're rolling in cash (or broke as a joke), how does your behavior change? The income and substitution effect explain reactions to almost any change in price or income. 

All about the labor market. Learn how cutting unemployment benefits affects the economy, people with good social skills make a lot more money (shocker!), Twitter can predict unemployment better than the government, and more. 

When you take a hard science (mathematics) and a soft science (philosophy) and mash them together, what do you get? Economics, the hardest of the soft sciences!

From production functions to early childhood development, human capital is a recipe for success. Learn about its applications, implications, and determinants. 

Five fresh findings takes a sexual turn. 

Social trust has been found to affect GDP. It's lower among minorities. (Perhaps why the individuals trust-falling in this stock photo are white?) 

A lesson in how not to create taxes, and explanations about a few kinds of taxes. Fun fact - a progressive tax is not a tax "favoring social reform", as the word "progressive" might imply. 

Have you ever wondered how many marijuana dealers there are in the US? The DEA has, too. 

You have died of dysentery! Wait. Not that kind of frontier... The production possibility frontier shows different trade-offs in production.

In socialist Venezuela, rising inflation & a ban on currency trading are leaving many struggling to survive. A few industrious groups of workers have been...

I recently read an article by Will Davies that brought up an interesting question: How did mounting inequality succeed in proving culturally and politically attractive for as long...

A favorite argument of politicians for low state taxation may be undermined by a new study indicating that state taxes have a negligible impact on Americans’ interstate moves. About 55% percent of moves were due to...

Who really has influence over government policy? * Some Princeton researchers have analyzed policies and influence, finding...

When evaluating proposed or existing policy measures, economists & government officials typically aim to improve the lives of others. The objective of any given tax, welfare, or law change...