Search the Site

Posts Tagged ‘Depression’

FREAK-est Links

This week, it’s official: coffee helps women with depression, charting the world mood through Twitter; our gloomy consumer confidence levels over the last three years; a marijuana DNA database; how geo-thermal plants can help produce lithium for electric car batteries; and Harvard and Yale’s endowments post killer returns.



This Is Your Market on Drugs

Sales of antidepressants remain brisk in spite (or perhaps because) of the recession. Slate reminds us of a decade-old study suggesting that widespread use of mood-lightening drugs could fuel irrational exuberance on Wall Street.



Let's Avoid Other New Deal Policy Blunders

In the third and final installment of articles comparing today’s economic situation to the Great Depression, economic historian Price Fishback implores policy makers to avoid the mistakes that were made in the Great Depression. His two prior posts in
the series are here and here.



The Financial Meltdown Now and Then

In the first installment of a three-part series, economic historian Price Fishback showed just how different the basic macroeconomic facts are in the current financial situation versus during the Great Depression.
In the second of three blog posts, Fishback turns to a discussion of the recent financial meltdown compared to the one that accompanied the Great Depression. For everyone still scratching their heads about what happened to the financial sector this fall, Fishback offers one of the clearest descriptions I’ve seen yet. He then discusses the similarities and differences of the financial collapse that began in 1929.



This Is Not Another Great Depression

Few people in the world know more about the Great Depression than economic historian Price Fishback, which is why whenever he offers an opinion on the subject, I always listen carefully. Back in the fall, Fishback wrote two outstanding posts here at the Freakonomics blog, one on what the New Deal tells us about the likely success of the stimulus . . .



Depression Cooking

All of Clara‘s recipes have the same ingredients: potatoes and onions. That’s because she was raised during the Great Depression, and her family was so poor, she says, she was forced to drop out of high school because she couldn’t afford socks. Now a great-grandmother, she wants to teach you to make delicious, nourishing depression cuisine, to help you through . . .




Quantifying the Nightmare Scenarios

Dartmouth’s Eric Zitzewitz is one of my favorite co-authors, and a whiz at tracking financial markets. And when he mentioned to me last week that a close look at the options markets told an interesting tale of fear, I asked him to share his observations. Here goes. Quantifying the Nightmare Scenarios By Eric Zitzewitz A Guest Post There’s no shortage . . .



The Forever Portfolio

The Forever Portfolio, spotted this week in the Nashville airport. Our friend James Altucher has a new book out, The Forever Portfolio, which is an investment book — the subtitle is “How to Pick Stocks That You Can Hold for the Long Run” — but it is also full of James Altucher stories about poker-playing and idea-generating and other stuff, . . .



Does Depression Lower Abortion Rates?

Sex is a notorious depression balm — a recent study of Australian women provides evidence for this. But does pregnancy fill the same role? A research team from the University of Newcastle found that one in 10 Australian moms suffers from post-natal depression (and it’s likely that she had pre-pregnancy depression as well).