Atlas Shrugged in Atlanta

Yes, I am quite excited for this movie to come out!

View all Atlanta events on Eventful

Grad School

Here I am in grad school. Well, I am at Emory, trying to eventually in 5 years or so get a PhD in Economics. And here I want to tell you about some of my 'successes' and things I learned.

Our professors are very intelligent. Just take my macro professor. When he joined the department, its ranking by publications went up by some 20 places. And now he is teaching us calibrations, pareto optimal social planning, social planning in general, dynamic optimization, Bellman equations, and a whole bunch of other things. However, when asked about his opinion on the Austrian view of the Great Depression, the professor's response after additional 5 clarifying questions, was that we may perhaps talk about the Great Depression in Italy, but that he does not believe that Austria had a Great Depression... Otherwise he is probably really good though.

Or our Stats professor. I think that he ranks among the top 10% of economists in the world. Pretty cool. And he also teaches as one.

Or our Chicago-grad micro professor who makes his own micro models (do not confuse for micro-processor). Also very intelligent and loves to give 'tricky' exam questions.

And then here is my class... half made of geniuses with master's degrees in economics and other areas, or with PhDs in physics, and half composed of your 'average guys' (ok, your average PhD students). Hmm, if you don't know which group I am in, try to guess.

I have realized how funny it is to have your 'average guys' be taught by top economists. Well, it is funny if you, like me, like dark humor. Just consider the grades. Our first micro exam ended with a median of 59% (I was the median btw.). Or our first statistics exam where grades spanned from 99% to 7% (I had again my average 56%). And now the macro midterm... where the class distribution of grades looked like this:

Just in case you can't see, the column tags read '70-80', '60-70', '50-60', and 'below 40' and the 'y axis' tells you the number of students within this percentage.

There are good things to compensate for our/my failures though. The lowest grade is B- and grading is done on a scale so, as I like to say, if we all failed we all did well.

And now, back to studying!

Murphy - Krugman Debate Plug-in

The French Response

As the French strike again, I thought of commenting on this, just for fun.

That the French strike about just anything is not surprising to anyone. However, I cannot resist the temptation to comment on this year's #1 strike against raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 (or 60 to 62 for early retirement). Actually, when thinking about this more in depth, the French response to this legislative change is awesome!

Imagine strikes, walking in fresh air, no gasoline means less traffic and less pollutants, and running from the police (what an exercise!). No electricity means getting more sleep. Also, striking means less work, less stress, less of the harmful sitting in one's office. (Let's forget about the trash piling up in the picturesque streets).

This all leads me to conclude that the French in fact are not just striking, they are collectively raising their life expectancy!

What an idea! The French are smart in giving their evil government the right response. 'You raise our retirement age? We live longer!'

I wish I was French... ;)

More on this issue on BBC

Econ Book Club 2010

The book club continued this semester! Here is what we got to read!

The Case for Gold

"But there are further effects that would become apparent during transition to a gold system. ... Unless such a transition begins quickly, we can expect to see the most massive failure of depository institutions in our history.

A movement toward sound money, while opening up all financial institutions to the sort of competition they should have faced all along, will, at the same time, relieve some of the pressure on the most critical of these institutions.

The alternative, of course, is massive government bailouts costing tens - perhaps hundreds - of billions of dollars."

- Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, 1982

It took only 16 years and here we had the government spending billions. According to this site, the TARP put some $250 billion into banks. I would like to know how much of this has been returned back and how much never will...

Higher Tax Credit vs. Lower Tax

To quote this article, according to Mr. President B. Obama, "The average tax refund [this year] was 10 percent larger than last year". Well, that may sound great to the few hard core Democrats who still believe that what this Government is doing will one day save this nation from debt, diseases, poverty, swine flu, terrorism, chicken pox, mosquitoes, evil corporations, people who want to be responsible for self, and all the other 'problems' that there are.

To me, this doesn't say anything positive at all, especially because of the way this was done. After all, this must mean one of the following two things 1) more debt now or 2) higher taxes later 3) or both combined.

I am not precisely sure on what an average tax refund is, but judging from the fact that most of my friends receive a refund of $1,000 or higher, 10% being $100, the whole 'higher tax refund' business will be probably quite expensive.

What was the tax refund all about? According to Mr. Obama, most of it was due to "college tax credits, making work pay, college loan relief, and home buyer credits." Well, great, so basically the government gives people incentives to go to college to get a degree that may not give them any sort of advantage, especially due to high unemployment and the fact that a bachelor's degree is today probably as much or even less than a high school diploma 50 years ago. Additionally, we get rolling with bad loans again when people who should not own a house in the first place (and could as well rent for a while) will take a mortgage and buy a house anyways. I am not sure on what a 'making work pay' stands for. I cannot imagine it's something much better than the other tax credits.

My question is, why, instead of making these tax credits, doesn't the government just lower taxes and its expenditures? Not to mention that because of so many tax breaks and all that, way more accountants and other tax experts are employed in this giant tax industry. What if all these people for once had to do something productive? Without tax breaks, they would have to, since otherwise they would have no job.

So yes, if you think tax breaks are good, ask first why lower taxes wouldn't be even better. :)