Tag: economics

Maybe education can be saved?

i am amused by these articles popping up everywhere. it’s always the same: some liberal arts writer complaining how hard STEM is, taking an online class, and then ending on a hopeful note that people will learn useful skills in the future, for a change.

Ideally, Udacity and other MOOC providers will help strip away all the distractions of higher education — the brand, the price and the facilities — and remind all of us that education is about learning. In addition to putting downward pressure on student costs, it would be nice if MOOCs put upward pressure on teaching quality.

College counseling

College counseling remains garbage. apparently colleges now make you go through counseling when you get a student loan to explain to you that you will owe money at the end of your degree. it’s unclear whether they also tell you that with the job prospects of your degree, it will take 3 lifetimes to pay back the loans?

winning isn’t everything

Freeman Dyson and William Press announced that they had discovered a previously unknown strategy for the game of prisoner’s dilemma which guarantees one player a better outcome than the other.

That’s a monumental surprise. Theorists have studied Prisoner’s Dilemma for decades, using it as a model for the emergence of co-operation in nature. This work has had a profound impact on disciplines such as economics, evolutionary biology and, of course, game theory itself. The new result will have impact in all these areas and more.

amazing contribution by freeman dyson (yes, he of the dyson spheres, not of the overpriced vacuum cleaners): tit for tat is not the only strategy in iterated prisoner’s dilemmas. i wonder what would have happened had we known this during the cold war.

Competition

competition might be a myth. seeing how ineptly most companies run their IT, it is a mystery how they can stay in business. so presumably they aren’t really exposed to competitive forces.

Real economic experiments?

Valve’s digital economies are a marvelous test-bed for meaningful experimentation. Not only do we have a full-information set (making sampling superfluous) but, more importantly, we can change the economy’s underlying values, rules and settings, and then sit back to observe how the community responds, how relative prices change, the new behavioral patterns that evolve. An economist’s paradise indeed

Uploads economics 101

fun exposition on what an economy of uploads would look like.

Failed states unemployment

Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50%. Greece’s is 48%, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30%.

youth unemployment is a leading indicator for failed states. who do you think leads revolutions?

Recycling 2b jobs

he is a bit too optimistic about 3d printing, but pretty much on the mark otherwise.

In these 5 industries alone there will be 100Ms of jobs disappearing. But many other sectors will also be affected. Certainly there’s a downside to all this. The more technology we rely on, the more breaking points we’ll have in our lives. Driverless drones can deliver people. These people can deliver bombs or illicit drugs as easily as pizza. Robots that can build building can also destroy buildings.

Synthetic culture

wherein we learn whether you can wish culture into existence. my prediction: no.

Qatar Purchases Cézanne’s The Card Players for More Than $250M, Highest Price Ever for a Work of Art. With this landmark score, the tiny, oil-rich nation joins a massively exclusive club: only 5 Card Players exist, and the other 4 are in world-class collections such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purchase is just the latest bid in Qatar’s effort to become an international intellectual hub.

Home Ownership is a fraud

270m Americans are already renters or neo-feudal peasants “bound to the land” by mortgage and consumer debt and the tax code

ignoring the talk about getting rid of the fed, very much agreed with getting rid of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, and the FHA. they support a harmful fetish and prevent savings from going into more productive areas of the economy.