Course timing and readings
** Your EETT Group Precis is Due on Sunday Night. We want those uploaded to the appropriate section on Blackboard. However, we also want a printed copy delivered at the start of class on Tuesday. Be sure all group member names are on it. * * *
We’ll be covering the challenges of Dynamic Efficiency calculations, and then moving onto the Valuation Section of the course.
Assignments and due dates
Your sixth weekly assignment is posted and is due on Sunday. Note that you do NOT have an assignment due over the Fall Break. Use that time to rest and enjoy, and of course make more progress on your EETT projects.
There will not be discussion sessions next week, but we will be picking them up after you return from break.
Course projects
EETT Advice: Use Economics! Frame the questions. Always ask where the tradeoffs are. If your group has met and has an outline, but feels an extension is warranted in order to make it excellent, send me a note with a description of your work and why you’d like the extension. Note I am not on email this weekend.
Group Project Cheat Sheet
We have THREE group experiences in lieu of quizzes and exams.
- 1. Get Outside Project:
- a. Due November 4th.
- b. Group size between 4 and 8.
- 2. EETT (this is part one of a two-part engagement experience)
- a. Reflection 1: due as part of Week 3 RRR (Sept 14th)
- b. Reflection 2: due as part of Week 4 RRR (Sept 21st)
- c. Individual EETT Submission: due Sept 25th
- d. Group Precis: due Oct 5th
- e. Final Project: due Oct 17th
- f. Group size between 4 and 8
- 3. Interview Project (this is part two of a two-part engagement experience)
- a. Project due December 11th
- b. Group size between 4 and 8
Other class administration and availability
TA Office Hours and Info Look for an announcement from our Head TA Cailtin Lipton for an update.
- The TAs are continue to offer office hours and weekly discussion sessions which will enable you to explore class topics more deeply, and to dive into portions of the weekly class work (and possibly receive credit for doing so). No discussion session next week.
My Availability: For the most up to date info on my office hours availability, and campus whereabouts and other ways (possibly) to meet and get in touch with me, check our Office Hours Blackboard page at tiny.cc/RizzoHours. I also post some job info on there and other items to discuss.
Office hours are a great place to bring your EETT group to bounce ideas off of me, and I am happy to help you all get a baseline start on the topics you are interested in.
Please stop by our picnic lunch bunches on Mondays and Wednesdays from 11:30am to 12:45pm, they’ve been fun. Meet new people! Talk to my freshmen!
I will be out in the ADKs this weekend mostly out of phone contact.
GET OUTSIDE
ADK Hike: I have a campsite again at Frontier Town this weekend, and plan to do the Jay Range on Saturday, and be exploring parts of Lake George on Sunday.
PICK YOUR OWN: Rochester is an awesome place to enjoy the fall harvest. My favorite two places are Lagoner Farms (on East side, they also host a nice restaurant, fudge shoppe and cidery) and West Wind Farms (on West side).
Upcoming Special Events
Department of Economics Engerman Lecture
Who: Robert Margo of Boston University
When: Wednesday, October 15th
Time: 5:00pm
Where: Morey 321
What: From the Artisan Shop to the Mechanized Factory: Inanimate Power and the Transformation of American Manufacturing, 1820 to 1900
The Politics and Markets Project, Hosted by Professor David Primo
Title: Topic TBD (this will be a moderated panel discussion, likely on immigration)
Date: Wednesday, November 5th
Time: 7:30pm to 8:30pm
Location: Wegmans Hall, 1400.
The Department of Economics will be hosting several additional events this fall, TBA, coming soon!
Expected Guests/Topics: Paul Bloom on Empathy/Compassion; David Livingstone-Smith (philosopher); Victor Haghani (money manager)
Some Things That Captured Our Attention
Elsewhere in Hedonics: Homes near carcinogenic chemical plants sell at 1% to 2% lower values. Is this large or small?
Is Lab Grown Meat Cost Effective or Not? “Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective
by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions.”
As Clark Griswold Exclaimed … Where’s the Tylenol? “Harvard School of Public Health Dean Andrea A. Baccarelli received at least $150,000 to testify against Tylenol’s manufacturer in 2023 — two years before he published research used by the Trump administration to link the drug to autism, a connection experts say is tenuous at best.
Baccarelli served as an expert witness on behalf of parents and guardians of children suing Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturer of Tylenol at the time. U.S. District Court Judge Denise L. Cote dismissed the case last year due to a lack of scientific evidence, throwing out Baccarelli’s testimony in the process. “He cherry-picked and misrepresented study results and refused to acknowledge the role of genetics in the etiology” of autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, Cote wrote in her decision, which the plaintiffs have since appealed.”
Shout it Out … Save the Whales! … with tradeable noise pollution permits
What is Pollution? Sunken Warheads Edition: “Scientists find more sea creatures living on toxic sunken World War II warheads than in the surrounding seabed, raising questions about how marine life responds to pollution”
Dark and Quiet No More, Chile Edition: (Maybe this is why Chilean fertility has absolutely plummeted to 1!) : In Chile’s deserts, you can still see the kind of dark skies our ancestors once knew. But city lights, the harsh blue glow of LEDs, and the rapid rise of satellite swarms are erasing that view a little more each day. On La Serena’s horizon, the glow has already wiped out 30 degrees of sky.
Why Don’t Many People Get the Flu Vaccine? Folks seem to not think it is very effective, and they worry a lot about side effects.
From A River of Sewage to a Public Swim Hole: “Chicagoans Avoided Their ‘Filthy’ River for Years. On Sunday, They Swam in It.”
Bird lovers are more motivated to take action to prevent birds from colliding with their windows by messages that emphasize the effectiveness of those
measures, while emotional appeals are more persuasive for the general public, a new Cornell study has found.”
Ironic Iconic? Why is an elite 3D printing company (they print entire communities of affordable housing) struggling?
Chart of the Week
Photo of the Week
“As if being a groundbreaking 19th-century biologist and a brilliant artist wasn’t enough, Ernst Haeckel not only gifted science with terms like ecology and stem cell but, in his spare time (!), also drew mind-bogglingly beautiful portraits of the creatures he observed. Collected in his masterpiece, Kunstformen der Natur (”Art Forms in Nature”) , these otherworldly-looking illustrations revealed nature’s hidden geometry and almost single-handedly ignited Europe’s Art Nouveau movement.”
Film, music, cultural item of the Week
They Said It
“At that moment the power of reading made itself clear and real to me. If I could see the words, then no one could control them or what I got from them. They couldn’t even know if I was merely seeing them or reading them, sounding them out or comprehending them. It was a completely private affair and completely free and, therefore, completely subversive.”
-James