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Posted
Jul 30 2008, 04:20 PM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Are lotteries unfairly designed to rip off the poor for the benefit of the rich? That's the conclusion of a group of psychology researchers in Pennsylvania, who think states ought to fix the imbalance.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers found that people who feel poor are more likely to play the lottery than people who feel rich. And as a result, the lottery in most states tends to be a very regressive tax that burdens poor people more than the wealthy. (It also, let's be honest, benefits shareholders, as owners of rocket-stock Scientific Games have discovered after their company shot higher in response to winning the Pennsylvania state lottery business in April.)
Doctoral student Emily Haisley constructed a study that made test groups -- culled from a Pittsburgh-area Greyhound Bus Station -- feel either poor or rich compared to a control group. The folks that felt poor bought twice as many quick-pick lottery tickets than the ones that felt rich. People bought even more when reminded that although people in different income groups face unequal outcomes in education and jobs, everyone has a chance to win the lottery.
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Posted
Jul 29 2008, 05:44 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
Cities compete like crazy to get the Olympics, but are they really such a prize? New research by sports economics professor Brad Humphreys suggests that cost overruns are usually out of control, and countries end up with much lower economic growth a year later -- belying all the hype that comes in advance.
Humphreys says the Olympic Games in Beijing, scheduled to start in two weeks, were originally expected to cost $1.6 billion, but a recent tally shows that China has spent $40 billion. The University of Alberta lecturer says the Athens games in 2004 were budgeted for $1.6 billion and ended up costing $16 billion. The London games were budgeted at $8 billion and already $19 billion has been spent. And one of the worst examples is Montreal, where citizens just finished paying off the games, 30-plus years later. Taxpayers always end up footing a big bill for their leaders' Olympic vanity.
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Posted
Jun 26 2008, 01:18 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
It’s easy to imagine that the 25 best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 Index this year are all oil and gas producers, and the 25 worst-performing stocks are all banks and brokers. Yet as we near the halfway mark in 2008, it turns out that there are quite a few surprises in the mix of best and worst.
For instance, the No. 1 stock in the benchmark index this year isn’t an oil producer, but a coal miner, Massey Energy. It’s up 155% so far, rising to $89 from $35 as coal prices have soared in the wake of booming demand in China and India. The No. 2 stock is actually a discount retailer, Big Lots. It’s up 100%, from $15 to $30, as investors speculate it will get a big share of tax-rebate money from low-income Americans.
Most of the rest of the next best 15 gainers
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Posted
Mar 27 2008, 12:46 AM
by
Jon Markman
Rating:
If it seems like you are paying more for your cereal, beer and pizza lately, shake your fist in the direction of Pakistan, Uganda and Argentina, because a weird confluence of international events are combining to slash the world supply of wheat and boost prices. The downside of globalization is that a crop failure 10,000 miles away can lead to pricier brewskis here.
It's actually a lot more serious than that. The New Scientist magazine reports that a wheat disease that started in central Africa actually threatens to destroy most of the world wheat crop, leaving millions to starve. A fungus called Ug99 has already spread from Africa to Iran and is bearing down on Pakistan, according to the report. This is bad news because Pakistan and Punjab wheat is extremely important to the entire food chain of the densely populous plains of South Asia.
According to reports, scientists hope to slow the spread of Ug99 by spraying new forms of fungicide but the only real firebreak will come when agronomists are able to create Ug99-resistant strains of wheat over the next few years. The disease, which is said to be a super-strong strain of black stem rust, first came to light in Uganda in 1999 and has since ruined crops in Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen. Now winds are expected to take the spores to Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Iran. Chinese scientists are said to be on a crash program to develop Ug99-resistant wheat strains before the disease ravages its already weakened croplands.
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