Why You Shouldn’t Shop for the Holidays
Joel Waldfogel doesn’t talk about Christmas the way most people do. “I was struck by how the resource allocation occurring through gift-giving was sharply at odds with the way we talk about resource allocation in economics,” he said. That’s what set Waldfogel, a professor in the Department of Business and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, to writing Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays. Below, he chats about why Christmas isn’t good for the economy and what makes the ideal gift.
Q. Why is Christmas …
