Course timing and readings
We Are Gonna finish up our trade section next week and starting moving onto Middlemen then Supply and Demand – woo hoo. Lots of drawing, hopefully not much droning.
Assignments and due dates
Your week 12 homeworks are posted. We will spend our research time exploring a seminal article in economics about why firms exist and what a world without firms would look like. We may be a “capitalist” economy, but even in the most capitalistic entities they are nearly complete planned mini-economies! Our Rumination is giving you a chance to respond to Professor Primo’s excellent Politics and Markets event from last week, or from our recitation discussions this week. So, if you are doing the rumination, you should open it prior to Wednesday.
Exam information
Exam Brief Update: It’s looking like you did very well. Look for Katherine’s note. We will be holding exam follow-up sessions this week, and your TAs will have the exams for you.
Exam Note: We do not do regrades. See the syllabus. We would be interested in seeing you present us with a question you feel we graded incorrectly generously.
Recitation information
We have a really exciting recitation planned for next week, nominally we are going to be asking you about whether we should be allowed to sell anything at all, but of course we plan to explore the implications of the question much more deeply. For example, I just ran across a video of a fella offering to sell his services allowing you to beat him up in public so that you can look tougher than you really are. Should he be permitted to sell this service? Should you be permitted to buy it? What are the implications of marketing it and normalizing it? What are the implications of prohibiting it? Do you feel differently about the moral limitations of buying and selling physical goods than you do about mental goods? And much more.
Other class admin, TA hours
TA Office Hours: Look for an announcement from Katherine!
Look for special office hours sessions coming up emphasizing supply, demand and trade practice.
My Availability: Call or text me if you would like to chat. I can be reached at 585-478-2677. I am in Rochester most of the weekend, but am entertaining all weekend. Next weekend, I will be out of town..
Stay up to date with office hours at tiny.cc/RizzoHours. There is lots of other information on that site beyond office hours times.
Upcoming Special Events
Date: Thursday November 13
Time: 5:15 PM
Place: Sloan Auditorium (Goergen 101)
Who: Professor Matt Mitchell (Toronto)
What: “The Economics of Online Content Moderation, from Twitter (X) to PornHub (XXX)."
The talk is specifically aimed at undergraduates!
Additional events coming soon.
Expected Guests/Topics: Paul Bloom on Empathy/Compassion; David Livingstone-Smith (philosopher); Victor Haghani (money manager)
Some Items That Caught Our Attention
When You All GPT Your Cover Letters: They become useless signals. Note that the amount of LoR requests I’ve had come my way in recent years has escalated. That is not sustainable. Solve for the Equilibrium.
Classic EWOT Finding: When work from home discourages cheating? “Overall, our findings reflect that financial misconduct is a team activity, sensitive to the organizational structure of the firm, with important implications for governance and organizational design”
Another Classic EWOT Finding, We Should Pay Our Public “Servants” More Edition: “Oopsy! "We demonstrate empirically that the bonuses backfired: they did increase exclusive participation in the public sector, but significantly reduced hours of work. When regions added offsetting bonuses for dual practice, they were largely ineffective."
UChicago, Spending Your Tuition on Its Mistakes? Ony the Maroons of course.
Textbook Econ 207 Application: The Obamacare Exchanges are Unraveling without the mandate enforced. “Premiums for the most popular types of plans sold on the federal health insurance marketplace Healthcare.gov will spike on average by 30 percent next year, according to final rates approved by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and shown in documents reviewed by The Washington Post.”
The Costs of Airplane Noise: “A one-decibel increase in annual day-night average sound level reduces house prices by 0.6 to 1.0 percent. Among alternative noise metrics, average exposure explains property value impacts most strongly. Willingness to pay for quieter conditions varies systematically with income and race, indicating that aircraft noise externalities have meaningful distributional consequences.”
Claims About Super AI: “iv) wages converge to the opportunity cost of computational resources required to reproduce human work, and (v) the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero.”
Running the Gender Labor-Market Counterfactual in Real Life: “Relative to women from the general population, women with the condition have better educational outcomes, tend to marry and divorce at the same rate, but mate with older men, and hold significantly more progressive beliefs regarding gender roles. The condition has also very large positive effects on earnings and employment. Dynamics reveal that most of this positive effect emerges around the arrival of children in women in the general population, with little difference before.“
Repugnant Markets, Late Stage Capitalism or NothingBurger? “Incredible job opportunity: £180,000 to "guide" a one-year old child "on his first steps toward becoming an English gentleman." "There is no reason why the boy can’t visit Lord's, Wimbledon and Twickenham for example, and be taught age-appropriate understanding of cricket”
But Will China Then Invade Taiwan: Possible advances in X-Ray lithography smash ASML chip fab monopoly. Insane if true.
Crash Course in Central Planning: Air traffic control edition.
Subsidized Contraception: “We find that subsidizing contraception has large and persistent effects on the choice of contraceptive method, resulting in significantly fewer pregnancies and abortions within two years”
Uh Oh. Contra Pr. Figlio on cell-phone bans.
Slay: “Newsom said of his apparently difficult upbringing. “It was just hustling… I was sitting there with the Wonder Bread.” Now, many critics are asking questions like, ‘Didn’t this dude’s dad work as an attorney for the Getty Oil Company?’ but I won’t be knocking Governor Gangsta’s “hustle.” Dude once had to slum it out in Pacific Heights. That house? Only half a pool inside (too poor for a full one). No elevator, either. In fact, during the pandemic, homie had to rough it out at the French Laundry, too broke to even afford a mask…”
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Chart of the Week
“What explains views about Artificial Intelligence?
Workers are more likely to believe that Artificial Intelligence is a problem for other people than that it is a problem for their own jobs. To be more precise, in our recent survey of over 1,500 American workers, about 24 percent of respondents said AI was a direct threat to their career, while a much larger 42 percent said it was a threat to the availability or quality of jobs more broadly.
This AI vibes gap mirrors a common pattern where individuals often rate their own position more positively than the broader economy.”
Photo of the Week
Overdone?
Film, music, cultural item of the Week
They Said It
The idea that joy is a thing, just lying there waiting to be found, is a specious conceit. Joy is an outcome, not a destination. It comes of purpose, pursued diligently. The satisfaction, lightness, and energy of joy comes after days, months, maybe even years of active engagement that is sometimes enjoyable and also, unavoidably, sometimes tedious, difficult, or overwhelming. Sustaining joy comes from the discovery of earned self-worth, and a theme of “Finding Purpose, Fueling Dignity” would have a far greater success rate on guiding young people towards it.
It comes as no surprise, in the era of coddled minds and social media, that authentic joy is so hard to come by and “finding” it has become a mere happy talk slogan. But it need not stay that way. Joy is alive and well wherever you find a human being pursuing their purpose with both enthusiasm and patience. Over at brother-publication Doomberg, where we write about energy, another element foundational to a flourishing life, we often say that “in the battle between platitudes and physics, physics is undefeated.” And so it is with purpose in the battle for joy…platitudes don’t stand a chance.
– anonymous