Questions for the week!

1. What is the difference between economics and finances?
2. How does economics influence the social behaviour?

"Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to
work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work." interesting. i wd say economics actually explain how things work as they do.

3. what has falling prices of coffins got to do anything with economics?
4. what is an incentive?
An incentive is simply a means of urging people to do more of a good thing and less of a
bad thing.
There are three basic flavors of incentive: economic, social, and moral.

For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is
an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying
to beat it.

Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million
American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly.
It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule.
Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a
Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children—children who
had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished,
representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
(Really? I need to explore more on this. Can such thing happen?)

5. Why is Vonage not picking up? Why is Time-Warner pushing for digital-telephony?