Machines in class considered harmful: This may, to some degree, be the growing pains of new technology. Perhaps we will find different things to be true once we will have trained our information-technology networks to be our servants as trusted information intermediaries and intellectual force multipliers, rather than (as they know are) the servants of the advertisers that pay them and thus that try to glue our eyeballs and attention to screens whether having our eyeballs and attention so-glued helps us become more like our best selves or not. But as of now the empirical evidence has become overwhelming: Susan Dynarski: For better learning in college lectures, lay down the laptop and pick up a pen
Resources on the Kinds of Uses of Math I Am Trying to Use in This Class: Street-Fighting Mathematics and Other Tools: Sanjoy Mahajan: Street-Fighting Mathematics. George Pólya: How to Solve It | Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Induction and Analogy | Patterns of Plausible Inference. Paul Zeitz: The Art and Craft of Problem Solving
Brad DeLong: Tools: Uses of Mathematics in Economics: Thinking Like an Economist | How to Think Like an Economist | Optional Teaching Topic
Eight Readings on Economic Growth
Four Readings on Economic Growth by Nobel Prize Winners Nordhaus and Romer
Malthusian Economies: Lemin Wu (2015): If Not Malthusian, Then Why?: A Darwinian Explanation of the Malthusian Trap: "The Malthusian mechanism alone cannot explain the pre-industrial stagnation.... Improvement in luxury technology... would have kept living standards growing...
Optional Readings on Keynes and Skidelsky_
Michael Kremer (1993) The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development http://www.jstor.org/stable/2118400: "People in business talk about quality all the time.... This paper makes a stab at modeling quality... proposes an O-ring production function in which quantity cannot be substituted for quality.... Under this production function, small differences in worker skill lead to large differences in wages and output...
...If tasks are performed sequentially, high-skill workers will be allocated to later stages of production. Poor countries will therefore have higher shares of primary production in GNP, and workers will be paid more in industries with high value inputs.... Imperfect matching of workers due to imperfect information about worker skill leads to positive spillovers and strategic complementarity in investment in human capital. Thus, subsidies to investment in human capital may be Pareto optimal. Small differences between countries in such subsidies or in exogenous factors such as geography or the quality of the educational system lead to multiplier effects that create large differences in worker skill. If strategic complementarity is sufficiently strong, microeconomically identical nations or groups within nations could settle into equilibria with different levels of human capital... #shouldread #economicgrowth
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