Subscription Art for the 19th-Century Set
How the American Art-Union brought fine art to the people, via a subscription service, in the 1840s.
When Did We Start Paying to Park Our Cars?
A Curious Reader asks: When and why did parking become monetized?
Finding the Value of Housework
Can housework be anything other than drudgery? Maybe part of the problem is that we consistently devalue unpaid work.
Did the Great Recession Make Us Sick?
Mass layoffs, high unemployment, and home foreclosures resulted in declines in mental health. There may also be long-term effects that linger.
Questions for the Age of Automation
Back in the 1960s, scholars were making predictions about what the Age of Automation would look like. Where they right?
How Hacking Got Hacked
How the archetype of the quirky, brilliant tech entrepreneur whose ideas could change the world migrated from high-tech hacker culture to Wall Street.
Why Economists Make Terrible Fortunetellers
Even the (presumably rational) economists of the world love to try to predict the future. They often get it wrong, suggesting that all the rational data in the world is rendered useless by the irrationality of human behavior.
How 17th Century Unmarried Women Helped Shape Capitalism
Under coverture, married English women had no rights to their property, even though unmarried women did, making for a unique system in Europe.
Elizabeth Warren
An early paper by Elizabeth Warren argues for a Financial Product Safety Commission that would regulate financial products.
The QWERTY Truth
How did the QWERTY keyboard became the gold standard? The answer is probably not what you'd think. Welcome to the economic concept of "path dependence."