Dear Class,
Our class has finally come to an end. Note that while the final exams and solutions will not be made available, I will print out solutions and have a copy in my office once the Spring semester gets under way.
A few things:
Course Grades
The columns in Blackboard with your final exam scores are open, and I have submitted the course grades to the registrar, so you should be able to see them soon. As a reminder, I do ALL of my grading without knowing who you are. I use your student id alone when downloading, calculating and entering your grades.
Emails About Grades
Our class policies and "how was my grade calculated" are written into the syllabus in great detail. We also emphasized several times prior to the final to check that your course materials have been accurately accounted for on Blackboard.
Any emails we get about grades will simply refer you back to the syllabus and our earlier announcements about grades, and we discussed this in our final class last Monday.
After I submit this note, today I am hunkering down and am not going to be available on my computer until the third week of January. I will not be checking my emails, and I will not be queuing them up, anything sent to me from now until January 16th will not be seen even after I get back. If you have a question please send your note after January 16th.
TAs for Fall 2026 Course
Thank you to many of you who for your engagement this year, and to those of you who have already expressed interest. As I mentioned, we are in the planning stags for next year I think with the changing nature of higher education, student engagement, AI tools, and so on, the way we evaluate the course, write assignments, sort out job tasks, and more is going to be changing – certainly some changes for next year, with an eye toward massive changes by the time 2030 rolls around. To that end, we do not know if we are hiring “jacks-of-all-trades” TAs (who do everything) or whether we will be targeting hiring into specialized tasks (e.g. a supply-and-demand expert who will run weekly tools workshops starting on week one, long before I get to the tools in lectures; e.g. recitation specialists; e.g. AI specialists; e.g. grading specialists; e.g. class review specialists; etc.). Obviously we want engaged students who care about the course, are excited about college and promoting conversation, and who want to help their future peers have a great first college experience. We do not have a “stock” candidate, we are very interested in finding a diverse, serious, fun, quirky, nerdy, relaxed, etc. group, so if you don’t think you are TA material, well, don’t think that. Stay tuned.
Look for additional correspondence from Katherine and Alexa and me regarding any (additional or new) application procedures for TA selection for the Fall 2026 class (I only teach Econ 108 in the fall). This information will come at the beginning of the Spring semester.
We may have one or more of our existing TA group join us next year, and in total we are looking to hire anywhere between 8 and 18 TAs. We are aiming for the hiring process to take place early in the Spring semester so that we will be able to announce a new group and get to our future course planning by Spring break. If you are very interested in the position and do not hear from us by the end of January please check your spam folders and follow-up with me.
The True Overlord
I know you do not need advice from an ol’ Boomer like myself, but a tiny bit is coming anyway. A lot of you (all of you) are going to continue to struggle to the day you die about “what I want to do with my life” and end up regretting a lot of the choices we did or did not make. I hope you all realize the reason for this is the same reason economics neither exists in heaven or hell. The best I can offer you as you think about life is to … keep moving, keep living, keep thinking, keep learning, keep loving. Our world is animated by gradients, and gradients inspire movement. This is what we mean when we say there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. In marketing, the “medium is the message.” In life, the process is the path.
How many people do you have in your life that make you want to be a better person, a better professional, a better friend? How many people do you truly learn from? How many people “leave it all out on the field?” How many people take the time to … think? Find them. In whatever is in important to you, make it work better next year and the year after and the year after. Continue to learn, seek feedback and find ways to do more with the EWOT.
Thank You For a Wonderful Semester
If I tried to convey the message to you that I am extremely thankful for having had the chance to work with you in the class this Fall, you'd probably have the alarm bells going off, "Hah! He's just like the Fresh From Local Farmers Who Care trucks!" That notwithstanding, thank you for your engagement and enthusiasm this semester. I do not know if there is a heaven, nor do I expect I'd be worthy of my place in it, but if such a place did exist I wished we all had the time to dive much deeper into the stuff we really only had a chance to touch on this semester, and of course it would have been very nice to be able to get to know many more you well.
My sincerest wish for all of you is that you take a deep interest in your future learning, and that you do your best to keep asking questions and to try to do so as charitably as you can. I think of that as an agreeable disagreeableness. Or is that a disagreeable agreeableness? I think the former. And get outside often and get lots of fresh air!
Have a productive and refreshing break, and best wishes for the New Year.
-Pr. Rizzo
585-478-2677
What Would An Announcement from Me Be Without Some Other Links and Stories
I happen to celebrate Christmas, and I hope you all have a wonderful time celebrating your winter/end of the year time. I stumbled upon this piece that blends a nice bit of reflection on the season with the tyranny of Pac-Man that we learned so much about.
Of course, I asked ChatGPT to make me an image of a grinchy looking Pacman with an Elf Hat on, but it refused to violate copyright and this is the best I could get:
Here is a relevant slice from the piece:
“This is the time of year when my Christian friends remind me via Facebook image macros that Christ is the reason for the season, and my atheist friends remind everyone that "Christmas" is at best a renamed pagan orgy and at worst a crass hybrid of religious conditioning and economic stimulus. ("God became a man to save us from sin, so let's get into a fistfight over the last PlayStation 4 at Target!") Well, let me take the bold stance that if you're using Christmas as an excuse to be a dick to somebody, you're probably doing it wrong. The real origins of this holiday are amazing, sacred, and etched into your very DNA. There's enough magic here for everybody, dammit.”
So in my mind, the Christians complaining about people losing sight of the real meaning of the holiday are right, in the sense that people do forget that it's supposed to be about generosity, redemption, forgiveness, and clinging to hope in a world turned dark, cold, and cruel. But it stood for those things before it was called Christmas. It stood for those things back when religion wasn't just something you did out of obligation to some tradition, or a set of ceremonies you performed in order to join a tribe or political party. No, back then, if the sun didn't shine on your crops, you had to watch your children slowly die. So you got on your knees and begged the sun to shine. You pleaded for the rain to fall, for the plague to pass your family by, for the winter to go easy on you this year. It was a time when it was so much harder to pretend that the Universe was under our control, when all you could do was look up at the sky and beg it for mercy.
And then, receiving no immediate answer, we would gather around the fire and eat rich food and sing songs and give gifts. Because while we waited for the frozen gray skies to render a verdict, all we had was each other and the warmth of our generosity.
But that was a long time ago. Our problems are less dire and immediate these days, and as a result, we forget that we're still the same fragile creatures we were then. And if you think that's all a big downer, this idea that Christmas (or the solstice, or Saturnalia) was all about the last hurrah before a slow death by freezing or starvation, you're looking at it the wrong way. I mean ... look around you. This is humanity in a nutshell: When faced with the cold specter of death, we put on festive sweaters and eat cookies and sing songs about a jolly supernatural being who brought joy to our lives before the spring came along and he melted, leaving only his hat behind.
Soon, many of you will be sitting in a room with laughing kids who won't be kids much longer and proud grandparents who won't be around much longer, or friends who for one reason or another won't be in your life. It probably won't occur to you that all of it is as tenuous as a snowflake on a dog's nose. It won't occur to you that there will never be another Christmas exactly like this one, that time will move on and people will change and that some day your most treasured memories will be things that at the time you experienced with nothing more than detached, mild annoyance.”
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Advice from David Foster Wallace
Welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested…. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
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Humanonics, The Knowledge Problem, and Why We Do What We Do
There is just something “right” about the work Chris Arnade is doing. Like “a spoon is not a spoon” a travel blog is definitely not a travel blog. Like the very best student essays I have seen, and the very best songs I enjoy, when I read Chris’ writing, I often remark to myself, “I really wished I had articulated it that way! Or … he is able to put words to feelings and ideas that I can only at best think about.” So here is an excerpt from his recent piece, that I think tells a great story about why we do what we do in Econ 108, and the power of the EWOT as viewed through a human lens:
As I wrote before, while walking is “certainly not the most efficient way to see a city, it is the most pleasant, insightful, and human. I don’t think you can know a place unless you walk it, because it isn’t about distance, but about content,” which is true of not only cities, but also a country.
Getting from Dortmund to Duisburg in two days by foot might seem pointless when you can do it in a half hour by train, but “it's not the destination, it's the journey” holds deeper truths than most cliches. Travel for me is almost entirely about learning, mostly about other people and cultures, with a focus on how we humans organize as the social animals we are. While you can get that from books, that process is filtered through other people’s eyes, and is also a narrow and dangerously formulaic way to understand the world.
Interacting with the world, as you have to do when walking, is an organic way to understand, one grounded in experience. It is also a more stochastic method of education, since you can’t predict what, or who you’ll encounter.
I’ve been reading the anthropologist James C Scott’s book Seeing like a State, about top-down ways of knowing, and in the last chapter he writes about the concept of metis, or “a form of practical knowledge, intelligence, and resourcefulness rooted in experience and context.” He believes that metis is a “better” way of knowing, at least when applied to urban design, agriculture, and other fields.
He contrasts that (in this and other works) with the more codified and formal techne, which is basically book learning.
To steal from a blog post, the definitions are roughly,
Techne is technical, scientific, and formal knowledge. It describes methods, procedures, and rules that can be systematically learned and applied. It tends to be codified, explicit, formal, standardized, top-down, abstracted, generalized, and universally applicable.
Metis is practical, experiential, tacit knowledge. It’s the accumulated wisdom or know-how that comes from practice or lived experience. It entails adaptability and the ability to respond intuitively in context. It tends to be local, situational, informal, decentralized.
As a guy with a PhD in physics who reads thick non-fiction in my spare time, I clearly value techne, but I firmly and adamantly believe metis is as valuable, and at times a superior, way to know, and might be the correct way to arrive at the capital t Truths of our world. At least it is the approach that will get us as close as humans can ever get to understanding the big questions.
It certainly is a better way of learning about what I care most about, which is what makes us humans human, which in my mind can’t be divorced from the social because that is one of our defining traits as a species, and metis is what dominates social interactions, and has for almost all of history, outside of modern universities.
Walking, especially very long distances, is not only about acquiring metis knowledge, but is also about learning what the metis of a certain culture is.
What struck me most while reading Seeing like a State was how much I agreed with the chapters on urban planning, which claim cities are more functional, at a human level, when designed via metis, from the bottom up, rather than via techne from the top down. There were large parts I could have written.
Cities better serve the residents when there isn’t a master plan or smothering regulation, but rather where the growth is allowed to be ad-hoc, which regulators see as chaos instead of self organized flourishing. They make the same mistake with interstice spaces which they see as something to fix by regulating them, or filling them in, rather than as small self-organized spaces for contemplation, or whatever else might go in them.
He closed last year with an even better article on the “Meaning of McDonalds” yes, McDonalds:
“Everything you want to know about America can be learned in a McDonald’s” because I sincerely believe that. Which is why, when I do a brief turn as a political reporter, I spend my months interviewing people in McDonald’s, not at campaign events, or non-profits, or even in diners, because all of those are self-selecting for highly engaged voters and elections are not determined by only the highly engaged voters but by the far larger “normies” who only tune in and turn out every few years.
…
They are where you find the metis, not the techne2, of a community, and the hill I’ll die on is that practical, experiential, organic, and tacit knowledge is as valuable, if not more, than technical, scientific, and formal knowledge. Both are important, and yet within elite circles, metis is seen as embarrassing, backwards, and outright wrong.
…
McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans, uniting every demographic in the US — it crosses economic class, race, gender, urban versus rural — with the single exception of the highly educated, especially academics. They alone as a group have moral issues with it, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.
…
It is one of, it not the only, place in the “real world” they can go, grab a cup out of the garbage can and sit at their corner table and fit in, at least for an hour or two, without encountering too many dangers. It becomes, for many deeply troubled people, their only life line to normal society. It’s a role McDonald’s, to its credit, has accepted. I’ve witnessed many episodes where the employees and morning regulars go out of their way to help those who come in that are suffering the worst. From free food, to calls for assistance, to having their husband come to parking lot and repair their broken-down car, free of charge.
…
As to the larger question, how is it that McDonald’s, a business founded and designed to make eating as quick and transactional as possible, become America’s default community center?
It has became that because people are fundamentally social and meaning making, and having a community you feel you belong to is foundational to who we are, and so if you provide them with a landscape of banal franchises, they will form communities, and make meaning, in a banal franchise.
(and a possibly excellent answer to Q30 on your final exam): As I wrote last week, he emphasizes the two ways of knowing, metis and techne, as one of humans fundamental divides. Currently, what I call the front-row, or the educated elites, are techne heads6, and see top-down urban planning and social planning as the route to building the best society, but in doing so, despite impressive results as measured in material wealth, they have missed the organic and human, because their framework doesn’t fully understand what a human is, beyond as a transactional rational economic thing … People need community, especially “spontaneous” ones built from the bottom up, rather than planned ones forced from the top down.
(and one more poem) ...
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Closed for Good
(yes, another from Robert Frost)
Much as I own I owe
The passers of the past
Because their to and fro
Has cut this road to last,
I owe them more today
Because they’ve gone away
And come not back with steed
And chariot to chide
My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means.
They leave the road to me
To walk in saying naught
Perhaps but to a tree
Inaudibly in thought,
“From you the road receives
A priming coat of leaves.
“And soon for lack of sun,
The prospects are in white
It will be further done,
But with a coat so light
The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the brush of snow.”
And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.
How often is the case
I thus pay men a debt
For having left a place
And still do not forget
To pay them some sweet share
For having once been there