“For most of you, this class will probably be your first modeling experience. My college development class was mine. Well, actually, my first modeling experience was in middle school. I went to an all boy’s school and we put on a play. I had to wear a sari. Anyway.”
Three back-to-back classes today. The first was Development Economics (what a better title than in the course book: Topics in Economic Growth and Development). The professor is a youngish South Asian with an amazing British accent. The post title and preceding quote are from today’s class. We were talking about how the assumptions microeconomics uses to create models aren’t usually fully realized in the real world, especially in developing nations. The most general microeconomic model we use tries to predict what “bundle” of goods a person will choose given a budget. Expanding this model to a market tells us how many goods will be bought and sold and at what prices. Anyway. One of the assumptions underlying this model is that people only care about their own bundle of goods, not what their neighbor has. This is referred to as “no externalities,” but it’s not really possible in the real world. The professor emphasized, “of course there are externalities. If I buy an apple, I am happy. But if I buy an apple for me and for my friend, I am more happy. It upsets me if my enemy eats an apple.” Sorry, that was a lot of explanation to put the quote in context. I found it hilarious at the time.
The class promises to be really interesting. We are grappling with a lot of the issues that I’ve been reading about in A Farewell to Alms: what is different about developing nations, in the past and present? How can economics create practical solutions to the growing disparity between rich and poor? Some things we will look at include the often broken systems of credit, insurance, and property rights in developing nations–how do put up collateral for a loan to buy a tractor that will increase your productivity if the government doesn’t recognize that you hold any land? One of the great generators of personal and national wealth in the modern world is the ability to spend money before actually having it, but people in developing nations often have no access to credit. (You may know that in 2006, economist Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in microcredit–providing small loans to poor entrepreneurs that otherwise didn’t qualify. Economics isn’t all evil.) I think the class is going to be incredible.
I promise not to gush as much about the other classes. Introduction to finance is about as plain as it sounds, but I think it’s something I could use. When I have some money to invest one day (far far away), I’d like to have a general idea of how futures and options and other securities work. The professor is the first I’ve had to lecture from a tablet PC; he goes through power point slides that he provides online before the lecture (NICE!) and doodles on them. If he wants to present a graph, for instance, he has a slide with a blank grid, and then uses the stylus to draw a huge graph for us. It’s really awesome–one of the biggest problems all economics classes face is that the tons of graphs on the chalkboard start to get convoluted because it’s hard to draw things as neatly as they sometimes need to be. The undo button magically lets him try again, on a graph as big as the projector screen.
Finally, I went to the other section of German. This professor has the same problem of inexperience (he earned his bachelors from Yale just four years ago), but he’s better organized and more casual than the other professor, and taking this class means I only have one class on MWF. I’ll keep going to both this week until I officially get into one of them, but I think I should be able to get into this one.
Having run into each other on the quad between classes, I called Sam to see if she wanted to hang out. In the spirit of our autumn in Spain, we decided to go to Bar Louie ($2 burger Tuesdays!), and we caught up over drinks and dinner. It’s impossible to believe that a year has passed since we were strangers in a foreign country bonding over Project Runway. She’s started work for the UTEP program, and will have a bachelors at the end of this year and a masters in education at the end of next. I would not be able to do all of the work she is doing. On the upside, she doesn’t have to find a job next year. Jealous.