Economy
Discover facts about economy. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Economy
Women entering the workforce doubled global labor supply
While framed purely as a massive leap for civil rights, it was also the greatest gift imaginable to industrial employers. Instantly doubling the pool of…
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Why some water rights punish conservation
In the arid American West, farmers are governed by antiquated 'prior appropriation' laws. If they fail to consume their maximum water allotment, their legal…
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Florida pays people to hunt Burmese pythons
Florida actively funds a mercenary war against massive reptiles. Because Burmese pythons are rapidly destroying local ecosystems, authorities pay independent…
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How embalming replaces the body's fluids
Preserving bodies for open viewings requires pumping them full of notoriously hostile chemicals. Funerary directors actively drain natural fluids and replace…
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Some bail jumpers can be hunted for a fee
While most nations rely entirely on official police forces, certain jurisdictions still allow rogue citizens to track down bail jumpers for a cut of the bond.…
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You can pay someone to stand in line for you
In major cities, you can literally outsource your own boredom by paying an hourly proxy to stand in an agonizing queue for you. They brave the elements and…
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When Zimbabweans washed dollar bills
Literal money laundering takes on a profoundly different meaning when your national economy violently evaporates. Following the utter collapse of the…
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How strangers choose the same meeting place
If you have to meet a stranger in a massive city tomorrow at noon with no way to communicate, you naturally go to the largest clock tower. Humans possess an…
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US student debt is bigger than Australia's economy
Congratulations on your liberal arts degree, it now collectively outweighs the economic output of a major continent. The US student loan crisis sits at nearly…
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Why slot machines beat casino tables
Forget the glamorous tuxedo-clad poker tables; the real cash cow is the flashing neon box in the corner. Hypnotic lights and repetitive sounds trick millions…
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Hasbro began by selling textile scraps
The kings of plastic toys started off literally selling scraps. The Hassenfeld Brothers founded Hasbro to sell textile offcuts and hat linings. They…
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Saddam Hussein's fake $100 bills were easy to spot
When you try to wage economic warfare but forget to hire a decent graphic designer. In the 1990s, the Iraqi dictator tried to crash the US economy by flooding…
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A Japanese one-yen coin can float on water
When your currency is so severely devalued that it literally lacks physical substance, you get the modern Japanese one-yen coin. Made of 100% pure aluminum,…
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Plutus was the ancient Greek god of endless wealth
In a beautifully cynical ancient commentary on fairness, the supreme distributor of human riches was famously depicted as having no working eyes. Greek…
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Carbon taxes penalize heavy polluter entities
Because asking corporations nicely to stop polluting never works. Implementing a direct fee on greenhouse emissions forces massive polluters to internalize…
Discover moreTaylor Swift re-recorded albums to own her masters
Hell hath no fury like a pop star denied her rightful royalties. By completely remaking her old catalog, she actively tanked the value of her original…
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How Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide its debt
When an entire sovereign nation needs to forge its resume to get into a prestigious economic club, they hire Wall Street. In the early 2000s, Greece…
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The sock puppet that burned through millions in dot-com money
The epitome of 1999 tech delirium was a dog sock puppet with a microphone. Pets.com had no viable business model and lost money on almost every bag of dog…
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Why empty containers pile up at busy ports
Global trade is wildly asymmetrical, meaning massive steel boxes pile up where they are useless. Countries that import far more physical goods than they…
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The hidden meaning behind the euro symbol
Unlike the organic evolution of the dollar sign, the Euro emblem was created in a sterile, highly controlled aesthetic laboratory. The precisely calculated…
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Banksy shredded his painting—and made it worth more
In 2018, Banksy’s 'Girl with Balloon' sold at Sotheby's for $1.4 million. The moment the gavel dropped, an alarm sounded, and the canvas slid through a hidden…
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Why furniture instructions feel impossible
Those wordless, hieroglyphic instruction manuals are an exercise in psychological warfare. Brands know that after three hours of swearing at a wooden plank,…
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A crypto CEO took $250 million in passwords to his grave
Not your keys, not your coins, and especially not your pulse. The CEO of QuadrigaCX, Canada's largest crypto exchange, suddenly died on a trip to India in…
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Why the same software costs more for bigger companies
There is no actual baseline cost for a digital enterprise tool. Sales representatives simply look at how large a client corporation is and invent a magical…
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