Author: EconLearner

The ugly combination of inflation and recession is maximizing pain for consumers and businesses, while also leaving policymakers without their usual levers to guide the economy. It creates a crisis that is greater than the sum of its parts, says economist Kellogg Philip Brown. “Stagflation is when the economy is stagnant and inflation is rampant,” says Braun, clinical professor of economics at Kellogg. “And the sum of two negatives equals three negatives.” The United States has been lucky to avoid stagflation for decades, since the oil shocks of the 1970s. But after fears of stagflation subsided during the COVID recovery,…

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A soccer team can give up a last-minute goal that is overturned after a check. The stock market may be approaching the point of collapse. Or tensions between two countries may reach the brink of violence before negotiations at the eleventh hour. In each of these cases, the end result is not that bad. But people may still want to assign blame for this narrowly averted disaster. People may hold the football coach responsible for the fact that the team almost lost the game, for example, or lost confidence in the president who risked financial crisis or war. Social psychologists…

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But what drives us to behave this way? That’s the question Kellogg’s has Mariam Kouhakitogether with Rajen A. Anderson of the University of Leeds and Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent, sought to investigate. Because punishment plays a large role in many major religious traditions, the researchers focused specifically on why, in some cases, religious people tend to be more punitive from the non-religious. In a series of studies spanning three countries and major world religions—the US (Christianity), India (Hinduism), and Turkey (Islam)—researchers found that religious people are indeed more willing to punish minor offenses. One of the…

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