EclectEcon

Shipping Delays and Textbook Orders

I don't get it. I can order books from Amazon and have them delivered the next day. I can order almost anything from almost anyone and have it delivered within three weeks or less. 

And yet university bookstores start hounding professors in April to select books for their courses that start in September. To be honest, I haven't even begun to think about what I'll cover in those courses; how can I possibly select a textbook over four months in advance???

Sort of a Nerdy, Dweeby, Dork

Well, finally, thanks to the Great White Snark, I have gained great insight into my character and personality:

 
 

Meanwhile, Stay Liquid

To the extent that the C.D. Howe Monetary Policy Council has any sway or any predictive abilities, it looks as if interest rates in Canada are due to rise by quite a bit over the next year or so. 

Toronto, April 15 — The C.D. Howe Institute’s Monetary Policy Council (MPC) today recommended that the Bank of Canada hold its target for the overnight interest rate (the very short-term money-market rate the Bank targets for monetary policy purposes) at 0.25 percent at its next announcement on April 20, 2010. The Council further recommended keeping the target at 0.25 percent at the Bank’s next announcement in June. The MPC’s recommendation for October 2010 was for a target of 1.25 percent and, looking one year ahead, for a target of 2.50 percent in April 2011...

The MPC’s formal recommendation is its median vote. Nine of the ten members attending the meeting recommended a target of 0.25 percent next week. For the announcement in June, however, the group was divided: while six recommended that the Bank hold the target at 0.25 percent, consistent with its conditional commitment to keep the overnight rate at its effective minimum through mid-year, two wanted a target of 0.50 percent in June, and two wanted a target of 0.75. Calls for the October setting ranged from a low of 0.75 percent to a high of 1.75 percent, and calls for April 2011 ranged between 1.50 and 3.25 percent.

Nick Rowe, of Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, is a member of the C.D. Howe MPC. According to the press release from which the above material is copied, Nick favoured quite a bit lower-than-median interest rates. It will be interesting to follow his blogging to learn his explanations.

Meanwhile, if interest rates are likely to rise that much over the next year, I see no reason to lock up funds in longer term investments unless the yield curve is pretty steep.

Gubmnt, Markets, and Ethanol

Phil Miller says it so well:

 If you have a product and say you need tax credits and mandates to stay afloat, I ask this rhetorical question: there are almost 6.7 billion people in this world and you can't convince a tiny percentage of them to invest in your company or to buy your product?

A Video of My Last Lecture at UWO

Professor Palmer's Final Economics Lecture, UWO 

My older son, David Ricardo (aka Matthew) Palmer, attended my last lecture and took this video. Unfortunately at times the audio is difficult to make out. Or, given some of the ruder things I said near the end, maybe it's just as well.

For those who might be confused, I have an assistant who, when I begin the lecture, puts signs on the doors instructing students that the lecture has begun and to enter via the rear doors, not the side doors. About 20 minutes into the lecture, a student entered via a side door, hence my comments about his being a York grad. Then a few minutes later, two more entered. 

For the curious, there are 450 seats in the classroom  but only 150 students registered for the course; hence the empty seats.

More Reflections on the Use and Misuse of PowerPoint

I detest most power-point presentations, but I understand they have a role if well-done in some settings. Of the three power-point presentations I have ever made, here are the details:

1. a presentation at a corporate convention about the state of the economy. I was told I must use power-point for the presentation. It was my first experience with doing up the slides for one. My slides were mostly graphs or condensed tables (large fonts, lots of open space, small amounts of info on each slide) which I then discussed or explained.
2. a presentation for a local organization about the financial crisis. Again, very few points per slide, mostly talking points.
3. I then used that presentation about the financial crisis as the basis for one of my intro econ lectures last year.

I especially don't like power point in the classroom. It has the same drawbacks as fancy prepared overheads that we still see in some settings and that were so prevalent back in the 1980s: students don't know whether to copy down what is on the slide or to listen to the prof. And if the prof does little more than read the slides AND make them available online, students might as well take the course online; there is no reason to attend the lecture. 

I do make my lecture notes available online. However, these are cryptic notes and are certainly not substitutes for either the textbook or the lectures. 

I can readily imagine that some well-prepared powerpoint slides with animation, etc., could help explain some of the concepts better than I do on a chalkboard or using blank transparencies to write my notes on an overhead projector. But these slides need careful development to provide positive learning experiences rather than merely being dazzling displays of graphic design.

What I cannot imagine, though, is giving classes using only overhead slides or powerpoint slides provided by a textbook publisher. When I read this [h/t Craig Newmark], I was flabbergasted. Are there really professors who prepare so poorly and who are so poorly informed that they cannot do any better than read off slides prepared by someone else? Or is it just that they are trained and expected to give such horrible lectures?

My Last Class Forever at UWO

Today I will be giving my last classes at The University of Western Ontario. I will have been here for nearly 40 years. Next year I have a de facto leave, which I will be spending at The University of Regina in Saskatchewan. After that I will officially be retired.

When I took the job here, I was persuaded by arguments from several people that "Western is a good place to have been." For the most part they were correct. I have had some interesting and truly enjoyable colleagues and have remained in touch with students from all the different eras of my life here.

People who know me also know that I have some deep bitterness about the place, which explains why I will not be back. Much of my bitterness flows from the directions taken by the department here; much more, however, flows from mismanagement and poor recognition of all I might have contributed in a different regime. I struggled for decades to contribute to the department, but my contributions (despite high citation counts and four different teaching awards) were not what the department or the university wanted. 

Why didn't I leave when the signals became clear? I looked; I was offered other positions; but given my family situation and other aspects of my life, I realized that all things considered, staying was preferable to leaving. 

But now it is time to move on.

Economics in Action: Students Respond to Incentives

Back in the 1970s, some people where I taught struggled with the problem of whether to provide pencils for students who were writing computer-scored multiple-choice exams. I think there might have been a sense that it would be unfair, in some weird interpretation of fairness, to fail a student who forgot to bring a pencil to the exam or whose pencil broke during the exam. Admins seemed to have little idea that students should bear responsibility for  assuming the risks in these areas.

So the department provided pencils for those who "needed" them, and the department lost many pencils in the process.

My solution was different. I told the students they must bring their own pencils, and if their pencil broke during the exam, they'd have to gnaw the wood away if they didn't have a sharpener or a spare pencil or two. If they didn't bring a pencil, I would be happy to sell them one for two dollars.

There were some good-natured complaints about price-gouging, but the students also quickly learned that I did not try to impose any barriers to entry into the pencil-selling business. In all my years of teaching, I think I may have sold one pencil. Most of the time, however, I was undercut by students offering pencils for 25 cents or so (often, though, students were able to borrow a pencil from a classmate if they forgot to bring their own).

I see from this, that a similar classroom policy works for stapling assignment pages together:

I personally hate collecting homework or papers of multiple sheets that aren’t stapled. Thus I require all papers be stapled (if needed) and on the day assignments are due, I bring a stapler and charge them twenty-five cents a staple (they are made aware of this rule on the first day of class).

I’ve had this rule since I’ve started teaching so I don’t know for sure, but I bet it’s resulted in more double-sided pages. Every single assignment I get is either one page long or stapled. Once or twice, a student rushed over to a nearby building to staple their paper and once I actually sold a staple. And I seem to remember a student once bringing in their own stapler and out pricing me for 10 cents. I’m not sure how much business he did, but I never had to deal with an unstapled assignment.

Students respond to incentives. Though I must say that I'd rather just subtract marks for unstapled papers rather than schlep a stapler to class all the time.

Peak (Olive) Oil? New prediction from The Economist

It made little sense to me as I read it. Then it clicked. Follow the links to a see a map of the pipelines.

The Economist predicts peak olive oil

Russia will profit most from the coming olive-oil crisis

New York, New York-- Peak-oil theorists, who claim that oil supplies cannot keep rising to meet global demand, have long been dismissed as scaremongers. But in one area they are being proven right, says The Economist in an exclusive.  It is becoming clear that reserves of olive oil will peak in the coming decade, as climate change wipes out most of the groves in the Mediterranean, the main production zone. The likes of Turkey will struggle to make up supply. Russia, however, expects to profit handsomely: its steppes, freed of permafrost, will soon host vast olive groves; a series of pipelines will send extra-virgin supplies westwards. Yet not all are happy. A Russian deal to pipe oil directly to Germany has caused dismay in central European countries that will be bypassed, potentially leaving salads undressed. On Thursday April 1st several leaders in the region released a statement dismissing the German move as the worst sort of “pal for oil joke”.