The Life of a Non-pre-med Student at U of R

Being at Rochester for about a month now, I have discovered something amazing. A lot of people are pre-med and I am not.

So, one day my friends and I are sitting on the quad when my friend Matt comes back from his job at the medical center and starts a conversation. He decides that his goal as a doctor is to cure cancer. He then amazed all the pre-med students around me with tales of genetic growth and living longer. And while everyone sat in awe and wonder of Matt's hope to cure cancer and the benefits that would follow, I questioned him.

The economic student in me, or perhaps the lack of a pre-med student in me, caused me to question Matt's idea and discover the consequences it would have.

First off, there would be a great increase in life expectancy. The modern theory of the commercial revolution states that there needs to be continuous improvements to allow productivity to outpace population growth. The markets would need to increase production, and fast! This would probably cause a second consequence:

The retirement age would need to be increased. Even today with cancer this is a topic of discussion. We would need to be saving money longer and pensions and social security policies might change to reflect a longer life expectancy. We would have to shift our "pie charts" of time and money spent on things to reflect the idea that we need more things to use, eat, live in for our entire lives.

Third, if suddenly our world population started increasing rapidly, we might succumb to Malthusian ideas and have a population check. Even if this did not happen, we would need a rapid increase in economic growth to deal with the population.

Fourth, the market would change. With no consequences to smoking or exposure to sun, the smoking industry would increase and the suntan lotion industry would probably crash. Doctors would be needed more to cure the cancers, although it would be easy, while cancer doctors might be out of a job.

And finally there is the environmental problems. In a world whose cancers are frequently caused by exposure to sun, smoking, and radiation, we would see no down side to these deadly things if they didn't hurt us. We only care about the environment for our health and well being and our resources. With cancer out of the way, people would smoke and use radiation causing environmental problems. Also I don't really want to go outside and see pools of radiation with chain smokers dancing through the streets.

While I do think cancer is bad and do believe that we should cure it, I tossed up my economical debate to my pre-med friends just to create a discussion. They promptly dismissed it as a joke.

What Social Science Does and Doesn't Know

Manzi's article on "What Social Science Does or Doesn't Know" explained the limitations of experimentation in the social sciences.

I found this article very interesting because of my background with social science experimentation. Last year in my psychology class, I had to perform an experiment. And while psychology is arguably more testable than criminology or business, the results of psych experiments still encounter the same problems that Manzi describes in all social sciences. I had to deal with false positive claims and the inability to reproduce my results in my psych experiments. Manzi's ability to describe experimentation through several fields in the social sciences supports his argument and allows for very little wiggle room. I was amazed how Manzi's evidence piled up and covered every social science from medicine to business.

I found that Manzi explained perfectly the errs in social science experimentation and how physics is so much easier to state claims. Although Aristotle made wrong philosophical claims, much like economists do today, there are experiments in physics that prove them wrong. There are no experiments that prove really anything for economics, or any other social science.

(to see what I thought was counterintuitive, see the questions at the end)

Manzi used examples of sick sailors, Capital One, and domestic violence in order to give value to his arguments. He showed that experimentation is difficult, but sometimes does work. However, we must be careful of the claims for effectiveness in positive results.

Manzi explains that there are limitations of experimentation in medicine, criminology, and business, because they lack control groups. Manzi shows how "few programs can be shown to work in properly randomized and replicated trials." RFT's, randomized field trials, allow scientists to use random groups as the experiment or control group because the differences in genetics or other factors will cancel out between the groups. Manzi then says that we it is more effective to change the incentives, not the people, in social experiments. And finally Manzi says that there is "no magic" and positive results do not happen by accident.

Manzi ends his article by talking about a future Experimental Revolution, but it seems far away.

We read this article because it is important for economic students to see the problems with social science experimentations and why debates get so heated with no way to solve any of the important questions. Also, we will be the ones probably taking part in this future experimental revolution.

      There were several points where I had to raise an eyebrow to Manzi. First, he seems to contradict himself when he says we must stay skeptical of claims for effectiveness in positive results, but then goes on to say there is "no magic" and positive results lead to improvements. What is Manzi saying and why is he contradicting himself? How does he expect our world to be weary and to support positive claims of effectiveness at the same time? Also, despite his random claim about magic at the end of the article, Manzi shoots down every positive result (that he brings up) and claims that the results are not reproducible, and thus we should keep experimenting. I'm not saying that we should stop experimenting, but this seems ridiculous.

      Also, where is the argument of the person who believes in the accuracy of the positive experiments? How would they support their claims? Obviously Manzi sees a problem with social experiments, despite his random magic claim at the end, so where is this other view point?

      Finally, will we ever find a way where we will be able to have a control and experimental group to find accurate results for the social sciences? Manzi talks about this experimental revolution, but when is it coming and will it even work if we are supposed to be so skeptical of positive experimentation?

Class 10 - Trends and Commercial Revolution: The world is less violent...just not in the place we go to school.

Today we continued with the power point.

We first saw advancements in computer technology, flying cars, and space hotels. We live in the future.

Then we looked at crime rates and murder stats and how the US as a whole has decreased in crime rates. However some cities (like Rochester) are still fairly violent. Great.....
But we actually discovered that we are less violent. We looked at the differences between war in the 1950's and today and have seen that there are 10 times less casualties. There are less wars and the wars kill less people.

We then saw the trends that people use markets to express their voices; markets are built to serve minorities, unlike politics. People can boycott products to express their voice, such as the bus boycotts in the civil rights movement.

We then saw that we are not ruining the world. The world is cleaner, has less pollution, and more forest and resources. However, the only reason that we care about our environment is because of the impact on health and well-being. Because people still live to 80, the environment is still clean and getting cleaner. People are happier and not always because of money.

Then we talked about the great stagnation. Today we have very little growth because we already went through our huge improvement. The poor countries are about to improve and take the "low bearing fruit."

Finally we talked about the Commercial Revolution. We saw that the Great Depression caused income levels to fall backwards 20 years. The Great Recession has caused income to fall back 3 years. The "Great" recession has been exaggerated so much. The difference in income from the last 3 years is almost nothing. The Commercial revolution expresses economies going from stagnation to growth, in money, liberties, and freedoms. There are 2 theories of the Commercial Rev: The Classical Theory, which says that people use up the increased productivity with more people, and the modern theory, saying that continuous improvements allow productivity to outpace population growth.

Class 9 - Pie Charts are Your Friends

In class today we discussed more about productivity multiples. We touched again on the functionality of goods and how we don't consume the good, say the comfy chair, but rather its function.

We then discussed how we do a lot less market and non-market work today, creating more leisure time. Then came the pie charts to prove this.

The pie charts showed what percentage of our time and money is spent on various things in 1790, 1900, and 2005. The 1790 chart showed that 91% of time and money was spent on basic necessities (i.e. food, shelter, clothes). The 1900 chart showed some growth with only 72% spent on necessities, but there was the introduction of leisure time and recreational activities. Finally the 2005 chart showed that today we only spend 38% on necessities and have created so many other parts of the pie. Between 1900 and 2005, we see that half as much is spent on necessities and we are also 7 times richer; this shows that we are actually 14 times richer than a hundred years ago.

We saw that income understates economic growth. And that things don't matter, but it's the service that those things provide. Living standards doesn't show the availability, capability, quality, conveniences, or safety of goods.

We then compared America to the world. We spend $1.2 trillion on military - that is the GDP of Australia. We then saw that 5% of Americans are still richer than 70% of the world. We saw that income has increased for the whole world, and that the rich are getter richer but not at the expense of the poor.

We then finally looked at car safety and how deaths have stayed the same, but deaths per million show a great decrease. (BTW. 1970's had an increase in car deaths because the drinking age was lowered between 1970 ad 1975).

Class 8 - We're Richer and Better Off....and cancer is good?

Today we continued on our journey through the world of power point.

First we talked about how we are better off today than we were in the past. In terms of life expectancy, people are expected to live half a year longer than the people born a year before them. From ancient times until the industrial revolution, people only gained a few days each year, if that. Also, less senior citizens have diseases and less people are getting and dying from cancer. All of this data on the increase in life expectancy, along with a sharp decrease in infant mortality since medieval times, shows our socio-economic progress.

We then talked about nutrition and intelligence. Our caloric intake between the industrial revolution and today has increased by about 50%. Through techno-physio evolution we see that people are healthier and a lot taller. We then discussed how our intelligence is increasing.

We then talked about the increase in living standards. We first talked about the labor market and how household labor hours has decreased, retirement has greatly increased, and more women are working. Women actually make more money than men...until they have kids. We also talked about household amenities and how basically, 100 years ago, no one had them. Rizzo then decided cancer is a good thing because it shows progress - there are more things out there that can kill us. And finally we discussed productivity multiples. These show that we need to work a lot less to afford products we had 100 years ago. However this doesn't think about the functionality of the products. Yes we need to work say 1/12 as much to afford a comfy chair, but this would a 19th century good. Today we are so much better off because the materials we have are better. Also I am not necessarily paying for the chair, but rather something to sit on, the function it provides.