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Sean Masaki Flynn
Sean Flynn, PhD, is an associate professor of economics at Scripps College in Claremont, California. A specialist in behavioral economics, Dr. Flynn has provided economic commentary for numerous news outlets, including NPR, ABC, FOX Business, and Forbes.
Articles & Books From Sean Masaki Flynn
Article / Updated 08-15-2018
A wonderful thing about free markets and competition in the economy is that output is produced at the lowest possible cost. This fact is extremely important because it means that free markets are as economically efficient as possible at converting resources into the goods and services that people want to buy.In addition, markets save society a lot of money because they produce efficiently without requiring human intervention.
Article / Updated 08-15-2018
For simplicity, economists often assume that people are fully informed and totally rational when they make decisions. You may think that gives people way too much credit, but economic models based on those assumptions work surprisingly well much of the time.However, in the real world, people aren’t always informed about the economic decisions they need to make, and they aren’t always as reasonable as economists assume.
Article / Updated 01-10-2022
When the economy encounters a negative demand shock, price flexibility (or lack of flexibility) determines both the severity and length of any recession that may result. If prices were infinitely flexible — if they could change within seconds or minutes after a shock — the economy would immediately move from Point A to Point C, and all would be right with the world.
Article / Updated 08-15-2018
Offering “free” healthcare, reduced-cost care, and health insurance all have drawbacks for the economy. However, Singapore has managed to create a set of medical institutions that delivers world-class healthcare while somehow spending 50 percent less than Canada and 70 percent less than the United States. Keep reading to find out their economic secret.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
In the United States, the economy is relatively stable and prices rise only a small amount each year. However, even moderate inflation causes problems by cutting into the practical benefits of using money instead of barter. You can get a better sense of this fact by looking at the four functions that economists generally ascribe to money and the ways in which inflation screws up each of them:
Money is a store of value.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
An important economic problem that results from poorly defined property rights that don’t take account of negative externalities is called the Tragedy of the Commons. Here, you examine this problem in detail.
The economic problem: Overgrazing on a commonly owned field
The Tragedy of the Commons refers to a resource being overexploited due to the perverse incentives created by common ownership.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
Conventional 20th-century neoclassical economics makes many accurate predictions about human choice behavior and how it responds to financial incentives and incrementally changing prices. But when the decisions involve uncertainty and require the chooser to risk or commit or trust, neoclassical predictions often fail.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
In some industries, cartels are effective at reducing output and raising prices in the economy. Typically, these are industries where one firm is large enough and powerful enough to truly threaten other firms with bankruptcy.In some cases, the industry will be broken up into even more firms to promote competition in the economy, but in others, regulations may be installed that regulate the prices firms can charge or the quantities they can produce.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
The economy thrives on competition. When there is no economic competition, you see the emergence of a monopoly which can have negative effects. In an industry that has only one monopoly firm rather than lots of small competitive firms, three socially harmful things occur:
The monopoly firm produces less output than a competitive industry would.
Article / Updated 08-14-2018
There is always discussion of bubbles and how they develop in the economy. Bubbles typically have a significant impact on the economy and economists often discuss the causal factors and outcomes of these events. Debt contracts, such as bonds and mortgages, are promises to repay particular amounts of money. When negotiating such contracts, lenders normally believe that those to whom they’re lending will be able to repay — or else lenders wouldn’t extend the loans.