Econ Extra Credit | Chris Aldrich

Read Zocurelia - Inspiring Learners to Read and Discuss by

Axel Dürkop (axel-duerkop.de)

With Zocurelia you can increase the fun of reading online literature together. The browser tool shows the activity of a reading community directly in the context of the texts being read and discussed. This way learners can be motivated to participate and join the discussion - hopefully hypothetically. In this article I will explain my motivation, ideas and decisions that led to the development of Zocurelia.

For those interested in online reading groups, journal clubs, OER, open education, marginal syllabus, etc., Axel Dürkop has created quite a lovely little tool that mixes Zotero with Hypothes.is.

Using his online version (though the code is open source and it looks like I could pretty quickly host my own), it only took me a few minutes to mock up a collaborative space using an Econ Extra Credit group I’d tried to encourage. This could be quite cool, particularly if they continued the series past the first recommended textbook.

I could easily see folks like Remi Kalir using this as part of their marginal syllabus project and allowing students to recommend texts/articles for class and aggregating discussions around them.

First of all, I wanted to learn more about how to inspire learners to read. And this means for me as an educator to create a technical and social environment that is welcoming and easy to participate in. ❧

Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:01PM

I want to have ways to show learners that I chose the texts for them, as I’m convinced that empathy is motivating. ❧

I quite like this idea as a means of pedagogy.
Annotated on March 03, 2020 at 08:03PM

📖 I’m 10% done reading Economy, Society, and Public Policy by CORE Team

Finished chapter one. I like that this text has so many linked resources, but some of the links to the sister texts make me think I’d be getting a deeper and more technical understanding by reading them instead of this more introductory text. Still, this has some tremendous value even as a refresher.

Annotations from Unit 1 Capitalism and democracy: Affluence, inequality, and the environment

Government bodies also tend to be more limited in their capacity to expand if successful, and are usually protected from failure if they perform poorly. ❧

They can expand in different ways however. Think about the expansion of empires of Egypt, Rome, and the Mongols in the 12th Century. What caused them to cease growing and decrease? What allowed them to keep increasing?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

Capitalism is an economic system that can combine centralization with decentralization. ❧

How can we analogize this with the decentralization of the web and its economy?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

Market competition provides a mechanism for weeding out those who underperform. ❧

Note how this has failed in the current guilded age of the United States where it is possible for things to be “too big to fail”.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:50PM

First, because capital goods do not fall from the sky: all countries that have successfully moved from poverty to affluence have done so, of necessity, by accumulating large amounts of capital. We will also see that a crucial feature of capitalism is who owns and controls the capital goods in an economy. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 03:11PM

Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM

We should be sceptical when anyone claims that something complex (capitalism) ‘causes’ something else (increased living standards, technological improvement, a networked world, or environmental challenges), just because we can see there is a correlation. ❧

Great and ridiculous examples of this can be found at https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 08:59PM

Figure 1.16 ❧

Note the dramatic inconsistency of the scale on the left hand side. What is going on here?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:23PM

Firms should not be owned and managed by people who survive because of their connections to government or their privileged birth: Capitalism is dynamic when owners or managers succeed because they are good at delivering high-quality goods and services at a competitive price. This is more likely to be a failure when the other two factors above are not working well. ❧

Here is where we’re likely to fail in the United States by following the example of Donald Trump, who ostensibly has survived solely off the wealth of his father’s dwindling empire. With that empire gone, he’s now turning to creating wealth by associating with the government. We should carefully follow where this potentially leads the country.
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:31PM

In some, their spending on goods and services as well as on transfers like unemployment benefits and pensions, accounts for more than half of GDP. ❧

What is the Government’s proportion of the US GDP presently?
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:34PM

James Bronterre O’Brien, told the people:‘Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property …’ ❧

great quote
Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 09:53PM

Yet some things that we value are not private property—for example, the air we breathe and most of the knowledge we use cannot be owned, bought, or sold. ❧

Annotated on February 10, 2020 at 04:49PM

Listened to The three C's of historical economic growth by Candace Manriquez Wrenn and David Brancaccio from Marketplace

The economic boom of the 19th century cannot be attributed to capitalism alone, according to Professor Homa Zarghamee.

This interview is part of our “Econ Extra Credit” project, where we read an introductory economics textbook provided by the nonprofit Core Econ together with our listeners.

For most of human history, the standard of living remained flat, not changing much from year to year, even century to century. Until the Industrial Revolution, that is, when the world population and standards of living skyrocketed.

Listened to What Econ 101 leaves out by David Brancaccio and Rose Conlon from Marketplace

The world is probably more complicated than your textbook told you. Feb 6, 2020

This interview is part of our “Econ Extra Credit” project, where we read an introductory economics textbook provided by the nonprofit Core-Econ together with our listeners.

A traditional introductory economics course might teach you that low unemployment drives up wages. And yet, even though unemployment in the United States is at a 50-year low, we’re not seeing historic wage growth to match. Many economists were surprised to find that the growth of average hourly earnings slowed in 2019, a time when it “should have” sped up.

It’s what University of Connecticut law professor James Kwak has been saying for years: those ubiquitous supply and demand curves aren’t as simple as Econ 101 lets on. Kwak has written about the issue for The Atlantic and in his book “Economism: Bad Economics and the Rise of Inequality.”

“The problem is not so much classical economics as an academic discipline, but I think the way first-year economics is taught, it focuses very heavily on the simple models, when in fact, the world is a lot more complicated,” Kwak told Marketplace’s David Brancaccio.

And if it’s the only economics class you take, Kwak thinks those simple models can be misleading. Take, for instance, the issue of raising the minimum wage, something a lot of 18-year-olds might walk into class supporting.

“When you learn about supply and demand curves, it gives you a very powerful picture that essentially argues that increasing the minimum wage will effectively just increase unemployment,” said Kwak, noting that economists remain split on whether this is true.

Part of the problem for Kwak is how compelling the economic models seem when they’re taught in Economics 101 under unrealistic assumptions, like pretending that people always act rationally or imagining two people trading on a deserted island. Professors can warn students about the limits of the models, but the models might be more memorable than the disclaimers.

“What I worry about is that after the final exam, or even worse, 20 or 30 years later when you’re a member of the House of Representatives, this is all you may remember about Economics 101,” Kwak said.

Since the Great Recession, there have been efforts among professors to improve introductory classes. There were several projects to write new introductory textbooks that ground economic models in real-world examples, one of which Marketplace is reading for our “Econ Extra Credit” project. Kwak said it’s an improvement.

“I think reading introductory economics is a great project. I think that it’s important to try to bring in context when possible,” he said.

“I think it’s important, and it’s more interesting to think about broader questions about how economic institutions work; about how technology increases living standards but also increases inequality,” Kwak said. “If you think about these kinds of questions at the same time that you’re learning the mathematical models, I think you’ll have a better experience and a better understanding.”

The next segment of Marketplace’s Econ Extra Credit is out today.

📖 I’m 4% done reading Economy, Society, and Public Policy by CORE Team

Read sections 1.0-1.3. I’m loving the graphs, charts, videos, and supplementary interactive material they’re including in the book. It’s completely fascinating and quite a different reading experience on a computer versus either paper or e-reader.

Having immediate access to data like this make for a more interesting Economics experience.

Annotations from Unit 1 Capitalism and democracy: Affluence, inequality, and the environment

Cyril Ramaphosa ❧

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Ramaphosa
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:00PM

PPP ❧

PPP stands for Purchasing Power Parity
How to Calculate and Use Purchasing Power Parity – PPP
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:07PM

But some have taller skyscrapers at the back, meaning a greater disparity between the top 10% and the rest of the population, whereas others have a less steep profile. ❧

It might be more interesting if the top decile in each country were broken into tenths to show the even more severe disparities. I suspect that some of the height differences would be even more drastic if we could see the top 1% or even the top 0.1% on these graphs.
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:36PM

A thousand years ago, the world was flat, economically speaking. ❧

I don’t think we have to go back even this far. If I recall correctly, even 150 years ago the vast majority of the world’s population were subsistence farmers. It’s only been since the 20th century and the increasing spread of the industrial revolution that the situation has changed:

Even England remained primarily an agrarian country like all tributary societies for the previous 4,000 years, with ca. 50 percent of its population employed in agriculture as late as 1759.

–David Christian, Maps of Time (pp 401) quoting from Crafts, British Economic Growth, pp. 13–14. (See also Fig 13.1 Global Industrial Potential from the same, for a graphical indicator.
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 01:03PM

If you have never seen an ice-hockey stick (or experienced ice hockey) this shape is why we call these figures ‘hockey-stick curves’. ❧

I’m glad they’ve included an image of a hockey stick to provide the context here, but I’ve always thought of it rotated so that the blade was on the ground and the sharp angle of the handle itself indicated the exponential growth curve!
Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 01:18PM

Watched Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes from The Joy of Stats - BBC Four | YouTube

Hans Rosling's famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of 'The Joy of Stats' he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.

More about this programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00wgq0l

I really love the visualizations here! There’s so much to pull apart and analyze. I do wish I had a more focused view on some of the time lapse. There are some countries moving around in interesting ways and I’d love to be able to watch what they’re doing and match them up with various historical events. Watching Japan, for example is fascinating. The near-global dip for large portions of the connected world in 1918 was particularly interesting to see as well.

Read How to Calculate and Use Purchasing Power Parity – PPP: Why Does a Big Mac Cost a Lot Less in China? (The Balance)

Purchasing power parity is a theory that says prices of goods between countries should equalize over time. Formula, how to use, and examples.

After the war, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel suggested multiplying each currency’s pre-war value by its inflation rate to get the new parity. That formed the basis for today’s PPP. ❧

Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:29PM

Why We Don’t Live in a PPP World
PPP depends on the law of one price. That states that once the difference in exchange rates is accounted for, then everything would cost the same.
That’s not true in the real world for four reasons. First, there are differences in transportation costs, taxes, and tariffs. These costs will raise prices in a country. Countries with many trade agreements will have lower prices because they have fewer tariffs. Socialist countries will have higher costs because they have more taxes.
A second reason is that some things, like real estate and haircuts, can’t be shipped. Only ultra-wealthy global travelers can compare the prices of homes in New York to those in London.
A third reason is that not everyone has the same access to international trade. For example, someone in rural China can’t compare the prices of oxen sold throughout the world. But Amazon and other online retailers are providing more real purchasing power parity to even rural dwellers.
A fourth reason is that import costs are subject to exchange rate fluctuations. For example, when the U.S. dollar weakens, then Americans pay more for imports. ❧

Annotated on January 30, 2020 at 12:31PM