I Need Your Ideas

Cruising Hawaii in a UHaul

I want to make a video with a little game. I’ve already ranked popular economics books on my tier list, now I want to roast them.

I’m looking for readers to submit a one-star review from Amazon and then I have to guess the book based on the review. So the worse the review the better it will be for the video!

Here’s the list of books I’m looking for with links to their Amazon pages (links are Amazon affiliates): Predictably Irrational, Nudge, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Capital in the 21st Century, The Deficit Myth, Naked Economics, The Undercover Economist, The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, Superfreakonomics, Freakonomics, Why Nations Fail, and Poor Economics.

And if you’re interested in submitting, just fill out this form.

Choosing My Field of Economics

Many of you are concerned with which field of economics to pursue. And I can tell it’s not just because you’re trying to find your interests. You’re trying to figure out what opportunity is available for you.

That’s why I’ve been doing my series on the fields of economics. And you have been so supportive of these videos. I’m going to keep producing them, but I decided to do a slightly different one. How did I choose my field?

I study economic history with a development twist, but that’s not what I thought I would do. I went to graduate school with different ideas of what my fields would be. So in this week’s video I walk through my story and give you 3 principles for deciding your field.

Don’t tell the people who don’t read my newsletter, but these 3 principles also guide how I choose video topics, and they can guide you for any creative or productive opportunity you’re pursuing. So head over to YouTube and check the video out!

Cinco de Africano

Wednesday is Cinco de Mayo, and there’s no better way to celebrate the Americanized Mexican holiday than with some chips and guac. And while you normally get your avocados from Mexico, that might soon be changing.

Avocado prices have been increasing, and increasing prices are a sign that new producers should enter the market. Welcome Africa. Many African countries are starting to produce their own avocados.

The article reminded me of a paper with a catchy title: Pineapples in Ghana. When Ghanaians started farming pineapples, many weren’t sure how much fertilizer they should use. The economists looked at how farmers in the same social network learned from each other to produce greater pineapple yields. It was an important paper towards supporting endogenous growth theory.

New Lit Review Tool

If you’re doing a lit review for your research, you may like this connected papers tool. It creates network graphs of papers, showing you who cites whom and then naturally organizing them into clusters. It may help you discover connections no one has seen before!

Here’s an example with my most-cited paper, “Is Uber a substitute or complement to public transit?”

U-Hawaii

I’m doing some research on the car rental market, and it unsurprisingly got hit hard during the pandemic. When people aren’t travelling, they don’t need rental cars as much. So in response, the rental car companies shed their inventory of cars. Well, now that tourism is picking up again, people want rental cars. But rental companies don’t have enough cars! What do you do?

Some tourists have resorted to renting UHauls! This reminds me of a silly movie where the family has a dream vacation planned, but everything goes wrong, starting with the family stuck in the back of a UHaul. But it also shows something about the degree of competition in the rental car market. When prices rise, and when entry is restricted, substitutes arise.