Articles 2025
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Controlling Quality: The Hard Road to Building a Brand
The New York Times, September 17, 2005
When Craig and Randy Rubin started Hi-Tex Inc. in November 1993, they never intended to open a factory. ''Our charter was no bricks and mortar,'' said Ms. Rubin. The business, in West Bloomfield, Mich., was set up, she added, to be a branding and a technology company.
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In Times of Stress, Can Religion Serve as Insurance?
The New York Times, "Economic Scene", September 08, 2005
From layoffs to bad health to killer hurricanes, economic well-being is subject to all sorts of nasty shocks. To protect themselves, people accumulate savings and buy insurance.
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How Modernism Got Its Curves
A look at the extraordinary career of designer Eva Zeisel. A slideshow essay
Slate, August 31, 2005
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Adding Social Norms to the Usual Methodology Mix
The New York Times, "Economic Scene", August 11, 2005
A restaurant on Honolulu's main drag is soliciting new workers. "Looking for Aloha Spirited People," says the help-wanted sign in the window.
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That Long Drive Out to the Airport
The Wright Amendment, whose existence rarely fails to shock out-of-towners, highlights the least attractive aspect of Dallas-area politics and economics: the prevalence of crony capitalism.
D Magazine, August 2005
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Market Share
Economists have long used their tools to analyze social phenomena. Now sociologists are learning to stop worrying and love -- or at least study -- the market.
The Boston Globe, July 22, 2005
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Research Changes Ideas About Children and Work
The New York Times, "Economic Scene", July 14, 2005
When Americans think about child labor in poor countries, they rarely picture girls fetching water or boys tending livestock. Yet most of the 211 million children, ages 5 to 14, who work worldwide are not in factories. They are working in agriculture -- from 92 percent in Vietnam to 63 percent in Guatemala -- and most are not paid directly.
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One Possible Cure for the Common Criminal
The New York Times, "Economic Scene", June 16, 2005
When Jonathan M. Klick worked in Washington, he noticed a striking effect every time the terrorism alert level went from its usual yellow ("elevated") to the more urgent orange ("high").
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Consumer Vertigo
A new wave of social critics claim that freedom’s just another word for way too much to choose. Here’s why they’re wrong.
Reason, June 2005
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Mass Medium
Forbes, May 22, 2005
Something about blogs makes a lot of respectable journalists hyperventilate. News pros seem terribly threatened by online amateurs.Blogging is a "solipsistic, self-aggrandizing, journalist-wannabe genre," writes David Shaw in the Los Angeles Times. Shaw, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for his media criticism, declares that bloggers are "practitioners of what is at best pseudo-journalism" and that "many bloggers--not all, perhaps not even most--don't seem to worry much about being accurate." (Emphasis added.)