When I meet people on airplanes and they find out I’m an economist, they usually ask about stock tips.

I think we’ve moved to thinking of parenting and pregnancy as something in which you should lose yourself.

Adhering to budgeting rules shouldn’t trump good decision-making.

Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that’s a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don’t make those investments.

Because economics is all about optimising, doing the best you can with what you have – it’s usually the first place you should look for answers if you want to maximise your happiness.

No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that’s why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting.

For many women – myself included – pregnancy brings on tremendous anxiety and confusion, along with the joy.

The key to good decision making is evaluating the available information – the data – and combining it with your own estimates of pluses and minuses. As an economist, I do this every day.

All’s fair in love and purchasing.

The most active period of the witchcraft trials coincides with a period of lower than average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age"...In a time period when the reasons for changes in weather were largely a mystery, people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather patterns. 'Witches' became target for blame because there was an existing cultural framework that both allowed their persecution and suggested that they could control the weather.