Economics – Page 78 – Barter is Evil

25 June 2014

Labor Trends in Grand Forks MSA

The growth occurring in North Dakota as a whole, and in most of the sub regions within the states, is quite impressive as media stories no doubt impart. Being a dismal scientist I pointed out many times here and on the Jarrod Thomas Show (1310 KNOX AM, shameless plug I know) that the growth in the oil patch represented a potential constraint on growth in communities like Grand Forks. While many disagreed with me I offer up the following trends that should give people pause.

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19 June 2014

Updated the Description Page

I updated the explanation in the “About the title” page for a few people that asked for more information about my lecture on the topic of barter, and it being evil.

19 June 2014

Economic Diversification in North Dakota and the United States

In a post last week I compared the allocation of economic activity in North Dakota with the United States. North Dakota has a larger share of activity in agriculture and extractive industries, but less in industries like information. There are many factors that influence the share of economic activity including resource endowments, transportation networks, and the list goes on. Consequently you need to be careful drawing policy conclusions from differences in allocations between two geographies. It could be very easily explained by resource endowments, such as oil in the ground.

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13 June 2014

Grand Forks Rent v. Own

There was a question from my radio appearance today about the number of renters compared with the number of owners in Grand Forks. At least, I think it was Grand Forks that the emailer asked about. If it was a different geography and they look at this post they can tell me it was something different.

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12 June 2014

Comparing North Dakota and the U.S.

One of the more common questions I get, from students, people at the store, on the radio, is: how would the U.S. economy would perform if it was more like North Dakota? It is a natural question given the strong performance in North Dakota and the weaker performance in the U.S. At some level this makes the comparison of growth a bit more consistent because the distribution of activity is made identical between multiple regions. In demography/population analysis (a class I am teaching this summer) the process is called standardization. It is essentially the same idea as calculating real gross domestic product with base year prices to control for the effects of price changes on growth. So lets take a look at unemployment and real GDP for the US, MN, and ND.

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