Economics & Markets

In cultures where periods are a huge social taboo, it’s actually the men who end up doing most of the shopping for menstrual products.

If a company sponsors a football team, their stock price jumps on game day regardless of whether the team wins or loses.

Watching financial news on TV actually helps regular people trade like pros instead of just following the latest hype.

India has likely been faking its economic growth numbers for 20 years, hiding a massive slowdown behind bad data.

We think flu shots work great globally, but that's an illusion—almost all the data comes from wealthy countries.

Giving financial support to widows can actually make their health worse in the short term.

AI is already shrinking the slice of the pie workers get, even in industries where pay is actually going up.

Giant tech companies actually win when their users start using their competitors’ services too.

Empowering women can actually lead to a temporary spike in fights and violence at home.

In China, market predictions of economic disaster have zero power to actually predict what’s going to happen.

Physical robots are way better for productivity than AI, but AI is way worse for how much of the paycheck actually goes to the worker.

If an AI shopping bot asks you a few smart questions, it's way better than showing you a million products you don't want.

The U.S. government is basically running a "command economy" in tech now, taking stakes in companies and demanding a cut of the profits.

Gas taxes stop working once a country gets rich enough—eventually, people just keep polluting no matter the cost.

Just teaming up with a college makes a company's stock easier to sell because investors love that "academic halo."

If you had a teacher who handed out "easy As," you're probably making significantly less money right now.

Growing up in a neighborhood with lots of immigrants actually makes people more likely to be anti-immigrant when they grow up.

Those brutal "stress tests" for big banks actually helped local businesses and families grow way faster.

If you offer cash for the "best" content, people will just start aggressively sabotaging everyone else with downvotes.

Big oil companies are dumping their old wells onto tiny firms just to dodge billions in cleanup costs.

Large companies aren't actually more innovative; they just wait until a small inventor has a winner and buy it right before the patent hits.

Most baby doctors now think we should deliver some babies early just so we can start life-saving gene therapy immediately.

In most places, people aren't buying brand new electric cars—the "green revolution" is actually just a wave of used EVs from other cities.

The pay gap between AI scientists in tech vs. colleges has exploded—industry stars now make $1.5 million more every single year.

Getting a government tax subsidy can actually make it more expensive for a company to get a loan from a regular bank.

There is way less plastic being dumped into the ocean by rivers than we thought—like, 98% less.

If a robot takes your job, your pay eventually bounces back; if AI takes it, you’re looking at a permanent financial slump.

Giving poor kids priority at elite public schools fixes segregation without causing the "rich flight" that school boards panic about.

Companies obsessing over the "long term" can be just as toxic to their value as the ones only looking at next week.

Working from home might be the most effective way to get people to actually have kids in the modern world.

Who your governor is actually accounts for about 5% of how well your state's entire economy is doing.

Giving cash to families with disabled kids often fails because the real bottleneck is the parents stopping working together.

Companies decide exactly how they're going to cheat on their taxes based on how complicated their products are.

Just having a super complicated tax system can wipe out a third of a country’s potential industrial output.

Pay transparency laws are backfiring—they’re mostly just giving raises to men and college grads, not the people they were meant to help.

YouTube has basically become a functional part of how we regulate banks now.

If you cut "secondary" healthcare programs, even the life-saving treatments you kept will eventually stop working.

Scaring students can actually make them do better on tests, especially for guys and non-native speakers.

Nurses can miss 16 out of 17 routine ICU checks and it doesn't matter—the only one that actually predicts if you'll live is whether you're "oriented."

Using AI to monitor companies makes their stock price go up, but it kills their ability to actually innovate in the long run.

Female CEOs are 40% more likely to get buyout offers—not because they're seen as weak, but because they're better at merging complex companies.

Hiring more doctors in China actually made it harder for patients to get medical care.

When a parent pulls their kid out of a school lesson, they’re basically acting as a government regulator for everyone else's children.

Regular people are opening thousands of PO boxes across state lines specifically to dodge online sales taxes.

One party's extremism is a trap you can only get out of if the other side decides to chill out first.

AI makes pay more equal for people in the same job, but it's causing the overall gender pay gap to widen in the industries that use it.

Nearly 70% of the specific stuff the government wants to do in a new law gets "lost" or deleted before the rules take effect.

We've spent ten years researching "flying taxis" without once stopping to ask if anyone could actually afford to fly in one.

If there's only one big employer in town, marginalized workers don't just get lower pay—they're the ones most likely to lose their jobs.

Stimulus checks actually kept used car prices down because everyone used them to trade in their old rides.