Like this:

For the past few weeks I took a break. This spawned from a variety of stimuli, from a calculus class, the emergence of gaming on my computer again, and a vacation back home with family. However, I have been properly chastised by at least a few of the readers of this blog in real life and have promptly and properly decided to return to my meandering topics.

Many of my topics will revolve around complex systems, having finished Eric Beinhockers The Origin of Wealth, and now gleefully tear into Complexity: a Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, all 1300 pages of it.

On a side note, if I ever become powerful, I must say “please bring me a chair, my greatness does not extend to this shelf” if there is ever an object out of reach.

Returning to the topic at hand, other major areas of interest will be in regards to money and banking, and healthcare policy, two courses I now under take in real life.

Today is rather bland topic wise, since I’ve yet to really find anything I needed to grapple with. So, in it’s place I’ll simply offer a few small tid bits.

People interested in immigration law should read this, which shows how some of peoples assumptions of legal immigration are actually lofty. Another good brief .jpeg put out by Reason Magazine can be found here, which shows the time line of becoming a legal migrant.

The issue of illegal migration is also tied heavily to legal migration. Talking about “closing the borders” is rather redundant when no offsetting discussion happens about our legal migration policy.

Secondly; it was rather odd for me as I sat reading my healthcare policy books. I realized that much of the philosophical underpinnings about healthcare policy I found myself unsure of. The debate over the past year + change had not fully swayed me into either camp.

The question is also unsettling when it comes to topics like car insurance, were whether or not people should be mandated to buy it is in question. Therefore, feel free to try to persuade me into any sort of camp on the issue, as it is a debate I am waging internally to little success.

Finally, my money and banking teacher brought up an interesting distinction between macroeconomics and microeconomics. At first he represented microeconomics as showing a small group of actors, and macroeconomics as only showing one actor- on the grounds of the economy as a whole. He then further tried to differentiate between the two groups by commenting that almost all macroeconomic models utilized the Net Present Value under the assumption that all actors in the economy used it.

I disagree on both grounds, on the first that macroeconomics is the accumulation of all actors in the economy. Seeing the model as representing all actors as an aggregrate on an average (his reasoning) rather than as a sum of all micro actors will lead to imprecise assumptions that stem from false axioms.

On the second topic, not all people use the Net Present Value formula, which pretty much ties in expected returns on future investments into each of our decision making models. The net present value is pretty much the sum of all expected returns at each point in time.

Many people are far more deductive and irrational than the NPV would have us assume. Due to history, bounded rationality, assymetric information, culture, family pressures, etc all influencing our decision making process. To assume that actors in the economy function using this formula is just naive and carries through with the faults on the macroeconomic models that I assume the professor will teach us.

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