Tuesday's Assorted Links
Cardboard Boxes, Pharmacist Shortages, Inflation Chickens, Girl Scout Cookies, and Construction Production
Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contained a lot of neat applications of economic principles.
What can cardboard tell us about the economy? [The Hustle]
CVS, Walmart to cut pharmacy hours among staffing shortage and reduced demand [The Wall Street Journal]
Move over pandemic puppies, egg shortages are driving up the demand for inflation chickens [The New York Times]
Find out how America’s shortest entrepreneurs sell billions of Thin Mints, Samoas, and Tagalongs every year [The Economics of Everyday Things]
A construction worker in 2020 produced less than a construction worker in 1970, at least according to the official statistics [The New York Times]
Yesterday’s newsletter explored the relationship between excludability, public goods, and the efforts of companies like Netflix to prevent password sharing. Discover the impact of password sharing on the profitability of streaming services and why companies like Netflix want to stop it.
Catch up on Monday’s newsletter:
I had dinner with an economic historian last night and we started talking about The National Archives and the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum. Thanks to my reading incredibly eclectic mix of reading interests, I was able to recommend a great book that I read a couple of years ago.
Paper Trails looks at the spread of U.S. Post over the past 250 years using a dataset of more than 100,000 post offices. The previous iteration of the postal network was much different than the network we know today. The old arrangements allowed the U.S. Post to reach many corners of the continent and helped spread news and information much more quickly. The book contains a lot of great maps of postal expansion, and the author has posted some dynamic images of on his website.
