Let me introduce myself. I am not an economist; I am a retired physics professor learning economics on my own. My notes, in the form of a tutorial, exist as a webpage.
What do you think about my notes? Input from economists would be greatly appreciated. My e-mail address is:
This is my first Forum message. Where should I be looking for anticipated public comments?
Thanks in advance,
Ludwik Kowalski
forum posts, MIT online courses, free, available
are really more for topic specific analysis, usually very short.
I looked over your notes and it looks like you're figuring it out but it's a little basic for EP.
I'm an engineer by profession but did take almost a minor in econ undergrad.
If you went through the advanced mathematics that often accompanies physics, you're going to be way ahead of the game. I get a terrible feeling that a lot of econ majors barely made it through Calculus. ;)
I too said to myself, about 2002 time frame "something is very smelly, funky and wrong" going on with that "free trade" rhetoric versus what is really happening to the economy so I started reading myself as well to figure it out.
One thing that is awesome, MIT has put a bunch of courses online for free. And they have some quizzes, with the answers.
I find online courses kind of useless if one is going to get serious without some method of test to see if you got it or not. (watch out for philosophical conclusions in that!)
I wish MIT would acknowledge, accredit by some method those who complete their online courses but of course that would defeat the purpose of very expensive, elitist, "we won't let you in" game, regardless of who aces the hell out of their stuff. Sigh.
Linky?
For those of us who haven't found the MIT courses yet?
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Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
see that "red" highliighted link?
or blue if you are in the other theme.
See that word "online" stand out from the others....
that is the link.
To the online course list and they have "Everything" online, including graduate course wares.
You all, anybody notice that links are in different colors...that's to clue you in something is a link.
It barely stands out on my monitor
Had to click on 2 "online"s before I found it. Definitely going to bookmark that.
You might try the more common "Light blue with underline, that changes to red after being clicked" standard from earlier days in the web, added to the CSS.
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Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
your monitor
Look, there is only so much I can do and people need to plain learn how to use the Internets. I have three monitors here, no one else is complaining and this site is fairly high traffic and I note that in the default theme, I also have a mouse hover, which when over a link will underline it.
Practicing
I am practicing. I want an image below this line.
I hope to see the picture.
Ludwik
admin technical comment for practicing
Your URL is invalid and why the image won't show up. If you are in firefox browser (maybe IE) you can right click on an image, go to "copy image location" and that should give you the correct URL to post elsewhere.
We have an admin forum too, for all of these technical formatting, wish list, help mes and so on if you want to post in there to get used to blogs and HTML.
My critique
On figures 1 & 2:
You're missing a 2nd line from nature to households- some stuff always comes for free (air), other stuff can be gained extremely locally (like putting rain barrels on your downspouts, or household energy production from ambient sources).
In paragraph #6- some of us think that GNP growth is largely fake- the Collapse of September 2008 proved that a large amount of it this time around was a systemic error in risk calculation. Other things that greatly influence this are the very inputs you're currently ignoring- governmental input (printing money as a service without collecting it from taxes first, and to a lesser extent, spending money with outside contractors to provide services) and foreign trade (especially the current free, unbalanced type where a small minority in the European Union and the United States benefits from everybody else's suffering).
Paragraph 9: It might be useful to note here that in real numbers, for the United States, TE is 108% of Yd- which is one of the main imbalances in the system. Making TS negative 8% of Yd.
Paragraph 10: You need some better variable names- the value of TS in paragraph 9 is defined as Total Savings, the value of TS in paragraph 10 is defined as Total Spending (which would be TE+TS, or Yd).
Paragraph 22: Now you have added back in government, but you still haven't taken "free trade" into account. Government expenditures, in an effort to stall the deflation, are now 30% of Yd. We're now up to C+I+G being 138% of Yd.
If this was physics, we'd be running up against the 2nd law of thermodynamics. But economics isn't physical, it's mythical, an invented story based on confidence and shared ignorance. So in Paragraph 25, while the monetary law is *assumed* to be true, it's only true as long as the shared mythology is still shared. If too many people at any given time choose to stop believing, M can go to zero or to infinity very rapidly.
That last bit is what Marx, Smith, Mises (wait until you look at HIS arguments!) and Keynes missed. There's no universal law requiring a human being to be a selfish actor. There's no universal law for any of this. The principles are as they have evolved, but there was even less design to the economic system than there is to the biological processes.
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Moral hazards would not exist in a system designed to eliminate fraud.
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Maximum jobs, not maximum profits.
New story...
Inflation is the symptom of too much money chasing too few goods. Inflation is, and always will be, a monetary event. It comes from one place only.... central banks. The only entity allowed to create money from thin air.
Here's a story:
There is an island where the inhabitants create widgets. Every year they sell 100 widgets for $1 to all the island population. GDP for this island nation is $100. (Zero inflation).
One day a suitcase of money washes up on shore containing 100 one dollar bills. What happens to the price of widgets?
It has always been about class warfare.