Category: Economic Mobility

Maxing Out: The Value of College

By Clayton Dines (Creighton University)

Once upon a time, college was considered a guaranteed ticket to career success. But these days, many college graduates enter the real world with a degree in one hand and a massive amount of student loan debt weighing them down in the other. A college degree can be a great tool for career advancement but it comes at a very high cost – tuition, time, (and for some) your mental sanity. So in this post, I ask the very important question: is a college education worth the investment? Continue reading “Maxing Out: The Value of College” →

Do Financial Regulations Decrease Financial Literacy?

Ask the average person about her smartphone, and the odds are better than even that she’ll be able to recite the make, model, and salient features such as battery life and camera quality. She may even be in a position to rank the phone relative to other handsets and to make a recommendation as to whether it offers good value for money. Continue reading “Do Financial Regulations Decrease Financial Literacy?” →

Bernie Sanders is Angry About Deodorant and Sneakers

During the height of the Democratic primary season in 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders made news by lamenting “You don’t necessarily need the choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this county.” Bernie asks an interesting economic question – why do we have so many choices between products that are essentially the same thing? Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in 2008 in part for answering this question. Continue reading “Bernie Sanders is Angry About Deodorant and Sneakers” →

Slow-Boiled By Good Intentions

In case you didn’t know, we surpassed the $20 trillion mark in debt. Like many recent college grads or new homeowners, the United States has piled on more debt than what it brings in every year. In fact, the government debt is larger than the amount of goods and services we produce in a year! In 2016, the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP for the U.S. was around $18 trillion; $2 trillion less than the total debt. Continue reading “Slow-Boiled By Good Intentions” →

Minneapolis May Experience An Uglier Minimum-Wage Fiasco Than Seattle

Minneapolis recently decided to jump on the minimum-wage bandwagon. This bandwagon is led by the “fight for $15” activists who are attempting to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour for the entire country. Since a blanket minimum wage increase at the federal level is not possible, they are going to localities instead. Continue reading “Minneapolis May Experience An Uglier Minimum-Wage Fiasco Than Seattle” →

Winter is Coming. Become Antifragile.

Antifragility is key to navigating the seemingly political and economic winter that is coming. As the wise Jon Snow — of Game of Thrones fame — would say, winter is coming and we know what’s coming with it: robots, shorter work weeks and substantial labor force disruptions. We can either sit around and wait or learn to live with the wildlings and diversify our income streams. Continue reading “Winter is Coming. Become Antifragile.” →