Waiting
Well, folks, I’m waiting to be hired at the MTC. A guy in my economic growth class who is over a whole group of Spanish teachers talked to me today about why they haven’t called me back for my second interview - there is a freeze in hiring in the Spanish and English languages. He said he’s usually over around 60 teachers and right now he has 24. There are less missionaries being called to speak Spanish, apparently. Even the Mexico MTC, he said, has only a 1/4 of the missionaries they expected…
Today in economic growth we discussed the role a nation’s productivity plays in its overall wealth. We all have a few basic factors that lead to wealth - capital (equipment, natural resources), labor (who works? what do they work in?) and even human capital (level of education, etc). But when we look at the income differences across nations, they aren’t completely explained by these factors. The left over, called the Solow residual, represented by A, is called the TFP or Total Production Factor. It takes into account not only how much capital we have or how educated are our workers, but how well do we produce? Are we efficient with the factors that we have? We haven’t gone into depth yet but it’s an interesting concept, especially because the TFP is literally the blanket residual (a residual in math is the same idea as it is in the physical world - what’s left over, like the residue) that is taken to cover whatever capital and labor does not. Then we watched the video. The reporter asks questions that really make the concept reachable, I think.
Hoy en mi clase del crecimiento de la economia hablamos del papel que toma la productividad de un pais en determinar el nivel de riqueza. Todos los paises tenemos algunos factores basicos que ayudan en determinar la riqueza - capital (o sea, el equipo, los recursos naturales), mano de obra (quien trabaja? en que trabajan?) y aun el capital humano (como educacion). Pero cuando vemos la diferencia en riqueza de estos paises, los factores mencionados no cobran todo. Lo que queda se llama factor de la producción total o FPT y tambien el residuo de Solow. Por ejemplo, ahora vemos no tan solo cuanto capital hay o que nivel de educacion lograron los obreros, pero como usamos el capital? Existe la eficacia en nuestro trabajo? No hemos visto el modelo con profundidad pero me gusta el concepto. El video muestra un economista que explica la recesion economico con respeto a la productividad en nuestro trabajo desde hace 1970.
I was secretly scared to see if The Sartorialist was still around after 20ish months. YES. Thank goodness!
Tuve miedo a ver si sigue el blog “The Sartorialist” sigue - no estuve en “el mundo” hace más o menos 20 meses. ¡SÍ ESTÁ! gracias, gracias, gracias.
Oh, Coach
Well, it’s different and sometimes rewarding being a woman in the econ group at the Y. Reasons:
1. Professors tend to remember our names [and by default, us as individuals] very easily. As Coach (Prof, Doctor) Butler puts it. The whole class is white males, so it’s easy to remember your [the girls’] names.
*note: the girls’ in my econ classes have always been a few gringas and an Asian.
2. Most of the guys are married. Interpret that how you will. For me, it’s nice because they’re really nice focused guys and we get the homework done efficiently.
3. I will sometimes get asked, “So, you’re a girl. What do you want to do with economics?” How am I supposed to respond to that?
*They’re a bunch of nice geniuses. I like studying economics [ahem international relations]. I like applying gorgeous mathematical principles to humans and the exchanges between us, at the individual and composite levels.
A classmate showed me this tonight in preparation for our lecture tomorrow - matrix algebra a must and I am so rusty! Apparently, the guy who does the tutorials came out of BYU!
Thanks Jowanza! Jason Santa Maria on Web Typography
The Quincunx and Correlation
A man named Galton developed the apparatus in 1973, in which one may drop balls. The amazing thing is that every time you drop the balls, they will always land like that, forming a hill. In math terms, you might say that they distribute normally, or in hillocks (as Galton describes). Statistics is based on the idea that a large enough sample or representation of any population (not necessarily of people) will distribute in the same way, with the mean or average being the crest or maximum point on the graph. When a population is normally distributed, we can make inferences not only that two things are related, such as, for example, finger length and body height, but they are co-related with a specific index of how they relate based on how “average” they are, and in the graph, how far away they are from the crest. Adjusting for how outside of normal a certain measurement might be, we can make a much better “index” of relation or correlation.
What might this jargon have to do anything? Well, all of modern science and experimentation uses the idea of one thing depending on others to happen. It could be physics, where energy is dependent on mass and the speed of light, or human biology, where the age at death can be predicted by many factors, one such might be smoking, to the social sciences, where a country’s proneness to war could be explained by the status of women in that society. The thread is that everyone finds a ratio that describes behavior. Then we use that ratio to explain the past and make predictions about the future. Cool.
Living on One Dollar a Day / El vivir con un dolar a diario
Our professor told us about this video - you can watch it free until tomorrow!
Nuestro profe nos avisó que este video se puede ver gratis - ¡hasta mañana!
The other course I have this term is Econometrics, which is using statistics to estimate, test, and evaluate different economic theories and approaches. By the end of the course we should know how to formally evaluate everything from the effect a job training program might have on hourly wages (before it is implemented) to the returns on different investment strategies. I’m not going to lie, I understood about half the lecture today, as you can maybe tell by my notes. But I think it’s so cool that René Descartes, who came up with the idea of plotting things on an x and y axis, is still important in an a statistical economics course in 2013!
La otra materia que estoy llevando ahora es econometría, que es el uso de métodos estadísticos para calcular, examinar, y evaluar teorias y políticas económicos. Al acabar la materia debemos poder evaluar mucho, desde el efecto de entrenamiento de empleados sobre salarios hasta los rendimientos de varios estrategías de inversiónes. No puedo mentir, entendí menos que la mitad de la clase hoy. Pero me encanta que René Descartes, quien ideó la idea de representar diferentes variables sobre ejes de x y y, ¡todavía pertenece hoy en 2013!
