Overall, there is strong evidence that education increases productivity directly
I wonder how COVID has affected this information. In a time where everything is online, is our productivity still being improved? I personally feel more distracted on a day to day basis in my school work and during my class because I am in the comfort of my own home. Although this brief probably did not come out during COVID, it would be an interesting perspective to add.
So he claimed early on that the virus posed limited risk to the American people and the American economy; that it would disappear soon “like a miracle,” perhaps when there was warm weather; and, more recently, even that injecting disinfectants could be explored as a potential cure for the disease.
It would be interesting to see how the Chinese government talked about this issue in comparison to the United States. It would also be interesting to see what other countries say about this type of ignorance. Do you think Trump has created a discourse in the United States that has completely skewed how American's should be viewing the virus? I personally do, and I also think the fact he calls the virus the "Chinese virus" would have an extremely negative effect on our relationship with China.
allow workers to be off the job temporarily,
Would an example of this be when women take a maternity leave?
airline pilots – where women earn only about 70 percent as much as men.
I wonder what effect this has on the amount of women entering this industry. Is this profession male dominated because it is a job with a decently large pay gap? It would be interesting to see how many women would be interested in this field if there was no gap.
Amazon is supposedly an unbeatable leviathan in retail. But the company has only about a1% share of the overall global retail business and less than 4% in the U.S. Walmart is biggerand its online business is growing fast.
This is really interesting and unexpected to me. I feel like the current perception is that Amazon is a much bigger company than Walmart in every way. This evidence is extremely useful in defending Amazon by proving they do have competition. Regardless, I still believe Amazon needs stricter regulations.
“I’m sure there are cases where we do promote our own products,” Bezos testified, calling it a “common practice in business.”
This is true, however, if he is purposefully demoting other businesses, is that illegal? Since he owns the site, it does seem as though he has this control. I'd be interested to see the laws regarding this practice.
After the experiment was over, though, I went back to using the companies’ services again, because as itdemonstrated, I didn’t really have any other choice.
Yes, you have no other choice, but if given other choices, do you think you would use them? It's interesting how reliant we are to these companies, but at this point, they are so familiar and comfortable that I'm unsure people would even want to switch.
Thomas Schelling, a game theorist who persuaded the Ken-nedy administration to install a hotline to the Kremlin -and who fig-ured out a way to put a dollar value on human life.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-much-is-human-life-worth-in-dollars/
This article goes into this concept which I found to be very interesting. He essentially realized that you can't value a life, but you can see how much a person would be willing to pay to risk their life.
economists played a leading role in curbing taxation and public spending, deregulating large sectors of the economy, and clearing the way for global-ization.9
How did they gain their credibility though? It would be interesting to know if there were certain people or events that proved the preconceived ideas on economists wrong.
"Economics was viewed generally among top policymakers, especially on Capitol Hill, as an esoteric field which could not bridge the gap to meet specific problems of concern,"
It's definitely interesting how many people agreed that economists were unimportant or irrelevant. I found it especially noteworthy that many of these people included big politicians.