divineguitar

Happy Sunday Morning!.  this morning finds me practicing some NLP techniques by LISTENING to an economics lecture and READING lyrics / poetry from Dan Wilson, the old frontman for Semisonic now turned solo artist / producer.  I’m also reading what ‘Shaggy’s Mom’ says about black swans and dark pools.

Taking notes from my informal class, I try to conceive the intrinsic value of formal academia, when colleges like Yale and Berkeley put lectures online for free.  What I can come up with: physical world and institutions for networking, entertainment value, and to collate information, books and the digital world, ..pluck age old wisdom at your discretion.

Some excerpts from the lecture:

JOKE:  We’ve all heard to people who talk in their sleep, economists are people who talk in other people’s sleep

WHAT MR KEYNES SAID ABOUT THE MASTER ECONOMIST: 

The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts …. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher — in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.

INTERPRETATION:  At one side of the pendulum there’s communism, the other is anarchy.  We’re fixated somewhere in the middle depending on which special interest controls what.

The very nature of economics is ‘people who understand tradeoffs and take them seriously,’ which by nature polarized politics cannot accomplish.

3 QUESTIONS ECONOMICS ASKS OF SOCIETY: what should be produced?  How is it going to be produced?  Who gets it?

RESPECT: The more you study the markets, the more respect you will have for them.  That doesn’t mean its right or wrong, its the same respect you’d give something like a hurricane.

The pencil example suggests that there isn’t a human alive that could single handed-ly create a pencil.  The lead, the wood, the metal, the eraser.  However markets can mass produce this at a cheap price.

INCENTIVES:  Incentives change ball games.  The advent of mad cow disease in England left the grocery stores with shelves full of meat.  The supermarket cuts the price in half, the meat is gone instantly.

SELFISHNESS:  An organizing principle for society.  Economists don’t believe in individual responsibility for prices.

Exxon isn’t the ‘evil one’ for increased prices in fuel, consequently, they aren’t the generous ones when prices are lower.