Miles Kimball

In a study of how people talk in English, the linguist Mark Liberman analyzed a massive database of spoken language and found that one in every sixty words people pronounce is either um or uh. Depending on how fast you talk, this means you are producing two to three of these ‘fillers’ per minute.Why do we do this? An obvious answer is that we use these fillers when we are momentarily unable to say what we want to say. We might be having trouble remembering a word or a name, or formulating our...

Dan Ariely has a weekly advice column in the Wall Street Journal based on Behavioral Economics. I felt all three bits of advice he gave in his April 23, 2019 column were especially useful, so I wanted to share them here. First, Dan suggests tackling especially tough tasks as one’s first big work item in the morning. He describes this as …...

Over the past 2 years, I have written some tweetstorms or threads on such and such history of economics topics. I used to list them on an apps that has recently closed, so here is a list (click on pictures or the links and scroll down to read the whole thread). I sometimes write tweetstorms to articulate some ideas or test the narrative structure of a paper that I’m writing, or to draw attention to a paper or a book I enjoyed, or more often, to bundle a series of pieces by historians of...

Japanese has a one-syllable word for 10,000: man. An early wearable stepcounter had the trade name manpokei, or “10,000-step measuring device” in Japanese. The article above, “Association of Step Volume and Intensity With All-Cause Mortality in Older Women,” theorizes that this is the origin of the idea—and default setting for many...

At the end of every year, culture critics get to compile best of the year lists. At Quartz, we decided they shouldn’t get to have all the fun. Just like films and albums, economics deserves a little year-end reflection.To identify the economics research that mattered most in 2018, Quartz decided to call in some help. Just as we did last year, we enlisted some of the greatest minds in economics today, including two Nobel prize winners.We asked these economists to name the study they thought...

I am proud that the Well-Being Measurement Initiative, headed by Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Kristen Cooper and me, is involved in this New Zealand effort. In the summer of 2015, I spent three weeks at the New Zealand Treasury working on this effort. Data collection is slated to take place this summer. I do not see guiding policy by well-being...

[embedded content]Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Email | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS | More CU Boulder lecturer Travis Rupp has a unique career that’s likely the envy of many: He explores and recreates ancient and not-quite-as-ancient beers – from the Gordium area of ancient Turkey to the United States’ first president – all while teaching Greek and Roman archaeology, art history, Egyptology, and Roman history at CU Boulder. Host...

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The European Central Bank and the Reserve Bank of Australia have announced more monetary stimulus. Larry Summers says the Fed should follow suit, in his latest Washington Post op-ed: The best way to take out recession or slowdown insurance would be for the Fed to cut interest rates by 50 basis points over the summer and by more, if necessary,...

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