economics

Pending the birth of Princess Kate’s baby, Lady Cosima Rose Alexandra Windsor is currently 24th in line for the British throne. Lady Cosima is the nearly three-year-old great granddaughter of a grandfather of the current queen. I didn’t know that, and I really wouldn’t care, but I did easily look it up, and I could do [...]

Marie Antoinette couldn’t get her head around the concept that peasants might resent a lack of bread. I mean, look at her bedroom! So, eventually, her head was forced to observe the resentment in a more detached manner. The Versailles life-style was unsustainable, even if the people living in Versailles thought they could stall the [...]

Upton Sinclair famously said:  “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”  Do our convictions necessarily follow our self-interest?  To me, Sinclair’s caution is to always look at the monetary incentives associated with a course of action, not just the direct ones, but those [...]

Well, not really. However, with recent reports that the US birthrate has fallen to a level not seen since 1920, one starts to speculate. As Pew’s research organization reports: “The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the [...]

We’ve been re-watching the TV series Smallville with our kids. It’s the story of Clark Kent as he grows from Kansas farm boy to city-dwelling superhero.  It’s a drama full of heroes (rescuers), victims yelling “Save me!,” and villains (persecutors).  Fortunately, at least every once in a while a villain will act like a rescuer [...]

In my last post on natural law, I focused on how changing minor “precepts” might make tremendous impacts on our theological understandings. I used cosmological models from general relativity to illustrate the point. Today, I want to look at things a little less, well, cosmically,  and review how changing scientific “precepts” over the last few [...]

Today’s guest poster is Tatiana, a crazy-cat-lady engineer entrepreneur scientist flexitarian mom wildlife-sanctuarian public-healthian global-developer pro-nuke feminist liberal Mormon. Averting Human Extinction party platform: There are 15 key points. Energy: Work with utility companies to aggressively move away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy including next-generation nuclear energy using reprocessed fuel. This will limit [...]

How Americans voted in this election can be directly correlated to whom they trust more (or whom they distrust more):  business or government.  How did your trust and distrust impact the way you voted? Discuss.

The blessed day has finally arrived!  The long awaited day after which we can stop caring about the election because it will be over, one way or another.  Which is eerily similar to what we thought in 2000 . . . Living abroad, I have been exposed to other countries’ voting practices.  In both Australia [...]

I recently read a list of the top ten reasons why you should consider quitting your job.  I thought the article about reasons to quit your job had some relevant parallels to what I hear from people throughout various internet sites who struggle with a faith crisis or otherwise consider leaving the church. First of [...]

Rumors of a widescale Mormon fast prior to the presidential debate were rampant on Facebook and even in some news articles.  I particularly enjoyed Pat Bagley’s cartoon on the topic.  In light of the much touted debate bounce that has resulted in a game-changer according to recent polling, I wonder if some of those faithful [...]

There are quite a few people who are very critical of the church’s investment in a high-end retail mail in downtown SLC.  Their reasons differ, but include things like: Mormons, Inc.  The church looks like a corporation, a business not a charity.  Worldly retail makes a strange bedfellow for charitable churches.  You can’t serve both God [...]

We’re in the home stretch of the US Presidential elections.  Hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to try to pursuade voters to vote one way or another.  We have a Mormon running for the first time against a first-time African-American president.  We have multiple issues – massive debt, economic problems, wars and rumors of wars [...]

Is it better to preach the ideal or to make all feel welcome?  Is it even possible to do both?  Within the church, there seems to be a tug-of-war between encouraging people to live the ideal and trying to be welcoming to everyone.  A “come as you are” approach has merit if we want to [...]

A few have criticized the City Creek Mall, not solely based on how the church invests money, but on the grounds that the mall is selling things that contradict Mormon practices.  How do you feel about selling or engaging in business practices that contradict our standards? Can you think of any others? Discuss.

As we get into the campaign season, I thought I’d reprise some more basic economics and accounting.  Just so you know what you spent (through your tax dollars) … 63% or so of the budget, about 2/3rds, goes out the door without any voting at all by congress.  Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Farm [...]

“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” The implications of this little dust-up over a few little words is the crux of this election’s economic debate and perhaps the key differentiator between the two candidates.  Does it take a village to be successful or not?  How do [...]

Last night I had a dream about my wallet.  The external coin purse on my wallet has a zip closure, and in the dream, the zipper was broken in both directions, and I had no way to keep the coins inside.  And there were so many coins.  They were spilling everywhere, and I realized I [...]

Introduction: More than 70,000 years of tradition Traditional marriage — by which I mean what marriage meant from before the Neanderthals went extinct to 1900 AD or so — was an economic institution.  Actually, for at least 70,000 years… Neanderthals like Middle paleolithic Homo sapiens did not have a division of labor between the sexes.  [...]

One of the striking things about the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon is that it appears that both Nephi and Lemuel claimed them for support. As you read through 2 Nephi chapters 17 and 18 you are hitting a favored text of those who claimed that Jerusalem had nothing to fear. When Nephi [...]