unAssuming
Posts with the tag economics:

Housing

 2023-05-21  1008 words  economics politics 

If housing supply stays constant and there is more demand for housing than available, then prioritization is necessary. Allocation priority is often assigned either by

  • willingness to pay induced by a market economy,
  • or first come, first serve induced by rent caps.

Livable Cities vs. Cars

 2023-05-07  123 words  economics politics two-cents 
Cars take tons of space While bike paths and especially public transport have significantly more throughput, more space is allocated to cars. This is fundamentally unfair. And this does not even account for the stupendous amount of space cars occupy while parked. Why do people move to the suburbs? They want to escape cars. Well, they are going to say they want to escape the noise and have easy access to nature. But cities are not loud, cars are. Here is a video of someone taking noise measurements and if we removed two car lanes and all parking, we could add tons of greenery to every street.

Economics 101

 2021-04-15  10691 words  economics education 
Utility Everyone has preferences. In some sense it defines what being alive means and I tend to view preferences as axioms. They are also treated as axioms in economics. But what are preferences? Formally preferences are a binary relation on the set of possible world states. The greater or equal symbol “≥” is such a binary relation for example and a good intuition for what we are getting at. We then make certain assumptions about this relation: First of all we assume connexity (also called “completeness”). This just means that we can compare any two world states, which means that for any two world states A and B, we either “weakly prefer A over B” (A ≿ B) or we “weakly prefer B over A” or both.

Categorizing Financial Instruments

 2021-04-14  2868 words  economics education 

This article is supposed to be a crash course in financial markets. Discussing the most important financial instruments with their intended usage and some of their unintended usage.

Fixed Costs are Increasing

 2021-04-14  884 words  economics 

I claim that every innovation in human history has decreased the share of variable costs and increased the share of fixed costs. In support of this claim, take a random sample of technologies, e.g. the list of practical technologies on wikipedia:

CO2 Budget Model

 2020-10-31  19 words  economics politics climate-change 
This is a quick and dirty embedding of an older shiny app you can also access in full size

The Economic Impact of Climate Neutrality

 2020-10-31  736 words  economics politics climate-change 

How much does it cost to become Carbon Neutral? Is it feasible? Or is it too radical? I think that many people paint a grimmer picture than necessary. In fact I would go so far as to say we can solve climate change in our lunch break. Let me explain…

Why Certificates are the Right Tool for Limiting CO2 Emission

 2020-10-09  1056 words  economics politics climate-change 

First of all: A tax and certificate system is equivalent to some degree. The main difference is that taxes set prices while certificates set quantities. But more on that later. And since taxes are easier to understand I will start with explaining them.

Why Communism is not discussed in Economics

 2020-10-05  706 words  economics politics 

Communism is not a bad economic system. It is not an economic system.

Every economic system is fundamentally an allocation algorithm. Somehow it must be decided what is produced, and who can use/consume that. An economic system is the “recipe” (algorithm) for making this decision. If you specify such an algorithm, you can make statements about the result.