Constantly Brooding Economist Summary

Charles states as his number one point that economics is really unpredictable. He uses the Coca-Cola Company as a fine example for this. That company starts of turning out to be loss and failure but within 10 years since it started it turned out to be very profitable. Charles also states that markets are extreme powerhouses over individual’s daily lives. Markets are also self-correcting because they use prices to allocate their resources. Individuals all work for their own self-interest so they can be better off in the society. One very good example the author provides is the Soviet’s socialist economy and how it failed because the bureaucracy controlled the economy, or basically he’s saying that

Individuals seek to make themselves as marketable as possible. The second is that all firms attempt to amplify the amount of money that they make.The author states that “maximizing utility is not synonymous with acting selfishly” (pg.8). He uses the example of the 91-year-old woman who spent her life working as a laundress in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. She lived by herself and owned a black-and-white television with only one channel (pg.8). Before her death, the woman had given $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship for poor students. The woman derived more utility from saving money and giving it away than spending it on herself. The author talks about how the prices of goods affect everyday life. Most people probably do not realize the effects prices have on us. The author mentions the spike in gas prices in 2008. The high price of gas forced Americans to buy smaller cars. The high price also increased the use of public transportation. It also caused many Americans to switch from cars to motorcycle. This increase in the use of motorcycles in turn raised the number of motorcycle deaths in the U.S. This change in the price of a single item shows the significance that prices play in the lives of

Situations where self interest and public interest work against each other are known as “commons problems.” In the market model the chief source of conflict is individual’s perceived welfare vs. another’s perceived welfare. In the polis model the chief source of conflict is self interest vs. public interest, or “how to have both private benefits and collective benefits.” Stone notes “most actions in the market model do not have social consequences” but in the polis, commons problems “are everything.” It is rare in the polis that the costs and benefits of an action are entirely self-contained, affect only one or two individuals, or are limited to direct and immediate effects. Actions in the polis have unanticipated consequences, side effects, long-term effects, and effect many people. Stone states, “one major dilemma in the polis is how to get people to give weight to these broader consequences in their private calculus of choices, especially in an era when the dominant culture celebrates private consumption and personal gain.” That is a

Rather than governmental identification of social problems and their solutions, conservations rely upon the market mechanics of supply and demand and the individual incentive of profit. Because government is exponentially larger today than it was before the Great Depression, conservatives today often critique the status quo and are resistant to further governmental expansion.

Reich discusses that citizens must not only look at what makes his/her dreams come true or what brings him/her happiness, but also what brings them the bottom dollar. He argues that the basic bargain of the American people with the economy is one in which what pays in gets paid back out. In other words, the company that employs someone should pay that worker enough to be able to afford the company’s products, thus keeping a constant flow of income for both parties involved. However, as years have gone on, there has been less coming to the people and more going businesses and the government in general. Reich argues that this has caused a downfall not only in the economy, but in a decline in happiness. By using logos heavily with statistics, Reich reaches his audience on numerous

Author Wheelan writes, "Life is about trade-offs, and so is economics." Indeed, so is Naked Economics. This book promises to be a good introduction to economics for the layman. Throughout the book, the author uses easy-to-understand language and vivid examples to illustrate his points in strategic places maintaining a sense of lightness with the readers in reading the material. Here is a summary of each of the 12 Chapters of the book Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan.

Making the most of the advantages of policies does not assure equality or examine moral questions which people value greater than other consequences. Nevertheless, utilitarianism offers a basis for public policy.

What do John Maynard Keynes, Richard Norgaard, and Fred Block and Margaret Somers have in common? They all challenge widely accepted economic thinking and support thoughtful, progressive government action in the midst of social crises. In the 1930s, Keynes debunks a rationale for a laissez-faire system that was perpetuating large-scale human suffering and made a strong recommendation for government intervention. Norgaard then broadens Keynes’s critique of assumptions underlying free-market ideology to include all widely unquestioned and accepted economic beliefs-- which he terms economism-- and urges a transformation of this belief system toward discursive democracy to enable effective environmental regulation and economic redistribution (lecture). Adopting Keynes’s focus on empirics while using a similar explanation as Norgaard, Block and Somers criticize a study of late eighteenth-century British poor laws that is commonly used to oppose welfare policy while explaining that its widespread, unquestioning citation in academia and policy analysis points to the pervasiveness of conservative assumptions about the poor and what is natural. Altogether, these authors urge us to reconsider dominant economic stories that lack a circumspect, factual basis as we consider various social, environmental, and economic policy alternatives.

Politics has created this falsified ideal that a competition driven economy between the division of socio-economic class is inherently equal in opportunity. That these classes “that of the more able and the less able, or that of the rich and the poorer, or even that of the ruler and the ruled,” are “at times, have been of “ameliorated social and religious ideals that instructed the strong to help the weak.” In fact, the exact opposite is true in nature. Traditional religious and political notions do not exist. Only the skeleton remains of what once stood an influential governance upon the economic structure of life. Barry further exemplifies the change in economic structure of life “as a purely economic ideal, competition does not contain or imply any such instructions.” The strong influence that is shaping society and even our government is the ability that ideal competition generates the ability for “the loser to simply accumulate in human dumps, like stores of industrial waste, until they gain enough misery and strength to overpower the winners.” Thus reflecting the nature of power that the changes in the economic structure of life has lead to the transformation of politics being controlled but the structure itself. This can be seen in the modern day example of how Wall Street was able to get away credit default swaps right from underneath the nose of the government and thus controlling the entirety of the economic

1. Gothic architecture (20 points) a. Describe the characteristics of Gothic architecture found in European cathedrals built between twelfth and sixteenth centuries. b. Include illustrations of the Gothic architecture and examples from Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" 2. Traditional Gothic fiction (30 points) a. Identify and explain examples of Gothic fiction (scary tales) from at least three (3) different cultures. b. Compare and contrast them with Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in terms of the Gothic style elements (from your notes) Literature, Artwork, and Music 3.

Critical Analysis of The Misery of Silence The Misery of Silence is a short essay in the book by Maxing Hong Kinston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, published in Alfred A. Knopf in 1976. This narrative illustrates the author’s childhood as a first-generation Chinese American and how her personality was split by living both in American culture and Chinese culture. When Kingston was little, she was so afraid of speaking English that she was silent in American school, which was a misery for her. Even when she spoke, she forced herself to make her speech sound softer and thus acceptable for Americans.

“There's an old adage in economics: If you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it. The same could also be said slightly differently in sociology: If you want more of a certain behaviour, reward it; if you want less, punish it.” – The Edmonton Journal

Todd G. Buchholz defines economics as the study of choice. Economists examine the consequences of the choices people make. The creation and evolution of economics over centuries came from the ideas of four economists: Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes. These well respected economists help the theory of economics grow and become what it is today.

Economists often say, “There isn’t such thing as a free lunch.” This means to get one thing, we usually have to give up something else we want. In other words, people face trade-offs. Making decisions requires trading off one goal against another. The concept of “people face trade-offs” is the first of Gregory Mankiw’s ten principles of economics.

When government makes public policies, they have to consider between equality and efficiency. I have noticed that our government imposes price ceiling on some necessities such as eggs and bread. This may improve the equality, as everyone can buy eggs at the same price. However, it is inefficient because suppliers would produce less eggs since they cannot get a higher price. In this case, they have to ration limited resources to produce the right number of eggs. Nevertheless, I agree with Mankiw that recognizing that people face trade-offs does not by itself tell us what decisions they will or should make (p.5).