Tuesday's Assorted Links
Grocery spending, holiday shopping, remote work, mental health, and free childcare
Hi y’all! Here are five stories from this week that contained some neat applications of economic principles or are related to teaching:
Mapping which US cities spend the most on groceries [Visual Capitalist]
Half of US holiday shoppers plan to use buy now, pay later services this year [Retail Dive]
In the US in September, about 8% of paid job postings on LinkedIn offered remote work, but drew 35% of applications [Business Insider]
OpenAI says hundreds of thousands of ChatGPT users may show signs of manic or psychotic crisis every week [Wired]
New Mexico launched free childcare for all, a first for a US state [Reuters]
Game 3 of the World Series wasn’t just memorable for its 18 innings; it was a lesson in economics. Millions of fans had to decide whether to stay up for one more inning or call it a night, weighing costs, benefits, and a bit of sleep deprivation. The game offered a perfect real-world example of marginal thinking and the sunk cost fallacy.
The 18-Inning Lesson in Economics
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The grocery data makes no sense. Detroit has a median income of 40k and spends 3.78% on groceries? So that’s $126/month? How can that be true?
Looking at the methodology it seems like what it actually calculates is a fixed food basket compared to median income (so the specific number is arbitrary). But higher earning areas tend to buy more expensive items so in practice the difference will be less.
I don’t know why they didn’t just look at actual spending on groceries in each city?