Will Today’s Working-age Women Be Tomorrow’s Grandparent Baby-Sitters?
A social norm in Italy appears to be grandparents spending the day taking care of their pre-school grandchildren. Even grandfathers can be seen pushing infants around in carriages and entertaining them in public squares, something very rarely seen in the U.S. But social norms don’t just happen—they can be created and later altered by purely economic incentives. Italy has now increased its retirement age substantially, at the same time that the labor-force participation rate of women ages 25-54 has increased by over 20 percentage points. When today’s middle-aged Italian women have grandchildren it is unlikely that they will retire from their long-time careers, and thus unlikely that they will be available to care for grandchildren full time. The social norm of grandparent care is unlikely to exist in Italy in 25 years.
Breakthrough Batteries?
The more time you spend talking with smart people about the energy future, the more you hear about the holy grail: great batteries. To that end, a couple of recent developments in BatteryLand are encouraging news. The first battery of interest comes from MIT:
Read More »A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car. The new battery relies on an innovative architecture called a semi-solid flow cell, in which solid particles are suspended in a carrier liquid and pumped through the system. In this design, the battery’s active components — the positive and negative electrodes, or cathodes and anodes — are composed of particles suspended in a liquid electrolyte. These two different suspensions are pumped through systems separated by a filter, such as a thin porous membrane.
Why Economics Falls Down in the Face of Fatherhood
I’ve been a dad now for a little less than two years, and I’m still trying to figure out how it is shaping my approach to economics. I think the answer is: A lot.
I learned economics in my twenties, before I became a dad. You know the drill: We learned hard math and complex models. Forget the Greek letters, they are just complicated ways of exploring the basic idea informing economics—that people are purposeful, analytic decision makers. And this idea just seemed entirely natural to me. I had always believed in the analytic self; I was rational, calculating, and tried to make smart decisions. Of course real people don’t use math, but I figured that we’re still weighing costs and benefits just as our models say. Or at least that was my understanding of the world.
Today, I’m not so sure. Read More »
Why Does the South Still Commemorate the Civil War, But Not the North? Peter Coclanis Answers Your Questions
Last week we took stock of the Civil War commemoration situation: namely that the South seems to be taking more pride than the North in commemorating the 150th anniversary of the war’s start. We wondered why that was, particularly when it was the South that was left so economically devastated by the war. For some answers, we turned to Peter Coclanis, a professor of economic and business history at the University of North Carolina, whose research focuses on the American South in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Coclanis offered some intriguing thoughts on the economic legacy of the Civil War in the South, and why many southerners are still so keen to remember it. We also solicited your questions for him. Now, Coclanis gives you his answers. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 