The primary recipients of newly created money are currently banks and corporations who are able to borrow from the Fed almost 0% interest and loan this to the public at much higher interest rates.
The increase in depression is most correlated with the increase in inflammatory autoimmune diseases and with significant changes in the western diet.
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Long-Term Trends in Human Well-Being
For millennia, everything sucked. Then something magical happened!
100 million trees and $178 billion worth of time could be saved every year by not subsidizing junk mail.
A 10 kiloton nuclear weapon can kill 1.32 million people. The 15,000 nuclear weapons globally could cause 19,500 megadeaths.
The cause of the US financial crisis is simple. It’s debt. This is a very simple and graphical evidence-based explanation of what caused the collapse.
The US spends more than $500 million per victim on anti-terrorism efforts. However, cancer research spending is only $10,000 per victim. Evolutionary psychology may offer an explanation for this irrational threat amplification.
Many Americans consider Iran to be a psychopathically violent nation that would be willing to commit suicide in order to kill as many Americans as possible. The statistics behind historical Iranian US relations do not support this view.
The financial sector receives more of the average paycheck than any other sector of the economy. Its share of the economy totals $2 trillion dollars. In 1985, the financial sector earned less than 16% of domestic corporate profits. Today, it’s over 40%. In the 1960s, finance and insurance accounted for only 4% of GDP, whereas in 2007 […]
There’s less than a 0.00001% chance that your vote will be the tiebreaker that decides the outcome of a national elections.You are more likely to be injured in a car accident driving to the polls (0.002% chance). Hence, if you are trying to make a practical improvement in your life and those of your loved ones, it is much more rational to just stay home on election day.
This is a rigorous analysis from the brilliant utilitarian mind of Brian Tomasik originally published at http://www.utilitarian-essays.com in 2005. I made this graph in 2007 to try to illustrate his point visually. Abstract. Consuming equal weights of different animal products may produce vastly different expected amounts of direct suffering. Farmed seafood may cause the most, followed by poultry products. […]
Dear President Obama, I know you’re very busy, so I’m very sorry to bother you with this. However, I think what I have to say too important for you to ignore.  I appreciate that you are trying to make the world a better place. I respect you as a person. Against all adversity you have achieved some very amazing […]
95% of suicide terrorist attacks are targeted at occupying foreign militaries. 0% of suicide terrorist attacks have been directed at countries not militarily involved in geopolitical disputes.
A clear examination of the true costs of the bailouts.
The brain takes in 11 million bits of data per second but the conscious mind can only process around 400 of those bits.
Around 20% opposed the US Revolution for democracy, about 40% supported it, and about 40% didn’t give a damn.
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Democracy Gonna Make You Rich, Bitch!
A country that switches from non-democracy to democracy achieves about 20% higher GDP per capita over the next 30 years.
A 2008 and 2016 poll of voters showed wishful thinking bias led a majority of people to believe their favored candidate was going to win.
The average cost of getting a new drug to market is $1.3 billion.
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A World Run By Economists
If only economists could run for office, the the compound interest on more efficient resource allocation, would have produced a utopia with flying cars by now.
This chart shows when the cost of the average stock (the S&P 500) exceeds its underlying value (corporate profits after taxes).