Halloween: Social Contract?

 

One thing you should know about the Ferguson household is that my wife is a notorious Halloween Grinch.  She's always grumpy on Halloween and has no interest in decorations, costumes, or most importantly ... handing out candy.

The role of government

A funny thing has happened on the way to an election that seems to have largely become a direct referendum on the role and size of government more than any specific policies - we got reminded just how much we all depend on government in a crisis and of the power and necessity of collective action and risk pooling.  Personal Responsibility and Job Creators can only carry us so far when mother nature decides to decimate everything in her path, it seems. 

Bob Schieffer's Mom

Another debate season ends with one of my favorite American traditions: Bob Schieffer quoting his mom: "Go Vote.  It makes you feel big and strong"

I know it's cheesy, but it's also very true.

On a related note, if any students are looking for a fun and interesting 21st century election year research topic ... We heard a lot in the last election about it being the first "social media" election with Twitter and Facebook just beginning to gain importance in fund raising and advertising - I think I would dub this the first "meme" election.  Somewhere in pages and pages of The Google there is a really interesting research paper that would also be an excuse to look cheezburger cats with "binders full of women"and Lord of the Rings characters decrying their lack of "horses and bayonets."  Semiotics project anyone?

The Importance of "The Ponder"

We have a person in our department who is a wonderful historian and teacher.  Let's call him Labid Scheim.  His first reaction to external stimuli is typically to "ponder".  He uses that precise word.  I was originally a bit critical of his persistence to ponder.  Alliteration aside, my concern was that such pondering may constrain an immediate effort to get something done when we really need as many people as possible instrumentally driving our program and department forward.  This is certainly not unique to him- many professors in our department and around the country take this approach.  Consequently, it feels like we do not have an instrumentally productive enough division of labor to be efficient as a department.  But then again, maybe Dr. Scheim offers us a reminder of the dangers of pursuing outcomes "efficiently"...

Marriage Decreases Gun Violence? (and subtle racial coding)

In last night’s debate the following question was asked: “What will you do to get assault weapons out of the hands of criminals?”

Romney answered: “What I believe is we have to do, as the president mentioned towards the end of his remarks there, which is to make enormous efforts to enforce the gun laws that we have, and to change the culture of violence that we have … And I believe if we do a better job in education, we'll give people the hope and opportunity they deserve and perhaps less violence from that. But let me mention another thing. And that is parents. We need moms and dads, helping to raise kids. Wherever possible the benefit of having two parents in the home, and that's not always possible. A lot of great single moms, single dads. But gosh to tell our kids that before they have babies, they ought to think about getting married to someone, that's a great idea. Because if there's a two parent family, the prospect of living in poverty goes down dramatically. The opportunities that the child will be able to achieve increase dramatically. So we can make changes in the way our culture works to help bring people away from violence and give them opportunity, and bring them in the American system.”

Economics ... it's not just about money!

An important event happened this week that I hope will be one more step along the path toward de-bunking the idea that economics is solely the study of greed and money and selfish profit-seeking behavior.  Too often students (and non-students including some of my social science colleagues!) get this impression and are turned off by the subject, perhaps because of the way we teach our introductory classes with an over-emphasis on traditional interpretations of price-based competitive markets and also because most of the time when an economist is quoted or interviewed in the news they are being asked about events on Wall Street or actions of the Federal Reserve. 

The truth is that we do talk a lot about money in economics, although for most economists that is simply a shorthand unit of measurement that we use for convenience.  We could do most of our analysis by considering any unit of measurement that relates to optimizing decision behavior -whether that is time, happiness, health, knowledge, equity (or yes, sometimes money).

If you had just one question...

Imagine if you could ask a presidential candidate just one question.

To make it more interesting, let’s stipulate that before the candidate could answer, he would have to accept an injection of truth serum.  For the first time, the candidate would say out loud what he is privately thinking.

Allow me to share with you my question to President Obama, and what I believe would be his response.

Belonging, Education, and Civil Society

I want to bring up an interesting study out of Stanford to talk about the role of educators as productive members of civil society.

Walton and Fisk (a psychologist and sociologist, respectively) found that women perform far better in traditionally male disciplines (math and engineering) when they are made to feel like they belong, that they "fit in" with those disciplines.  Essentially when women are around sexist men who make them feel like they should try fitting into more typically female disciplines (writing, for example), women tend to do worse in their math and engineering performances.  In addition, when women hear uplifting stories about how well women do in math and engineering, they will feel like they belong and perform better.  Part of this might be because they will work harder to learn math and engineering, and part of this might be the simple confidence boost that gets them to productively use the knowledge they already have in their brains. Either way, feeling like you belong really matters to how well you will perform at something, especially if you've been told before that you do not belong (in either subtle or overt ways).

Democrats Dilemma

In the days since the October 3 presidential debate, national polls continue to show President Obama maintaining a slight lead over Governor Romney.  These national polls are misleading and, I suspect, are lulling Democrats into believing that the debate was something less than the unmitigated disaster for them that it really was.

Recession blues

I can live with rampant foreclosures, skyrocketing unemployment, massive government budget cuts, and a plummeting stock market, but when a recession has threatened the existence of Fender guitars we've reached a point where the very threads of society are about to be ripped asunder. 

An interesting article in the NYTimes over the weekend about how Fender Musical Instruments, Inc has been hit hard by the recession.  This is a good example of an economic "luxury" good, and this is the type of good you would expect to take a hard demand hit when incomes go down during an economic slowdown.  Making matters worse are a complex combination of effects caused by Wall Street insiders, changing musical genre tastes, competition from international firms with cheaper mass production techniques, and even Mitt Romney!