Nerd Post #1: Econ

My first course at Georgetown this summer is Econ. Yikes. I had to do a pre-req at NCSU in order to take this course and pretty much we covered all that material in one class period at Georgetown. Flying man, we were flyin through the material!

Also, the professor is awesome! Not sure where he's from or where he teaches.. i may or may not have missed the first minute of class when that woulda been covered cuz i was late.. but he's awesome. He's a funny guy but a genius at the same time.. i wanna say that's pretty rare. I've really enjoyed the one class we've had with him so far. He opened my eyes wide and I realized that really you can apply economics to sooo many real-life situations. And he provided lots of them!

Most of them were related to political topics so it was super interesting to be jotting down a chart depicting possible outcomes when a Sophomore at Harvard, tried to enter the Sudanese human-slave trade market to purchase slaves to then set free. Interesting to see the effects, how one, following the original hope of making a good impact, and the other the polar opposite.. having even more people captured and forced into slavery.

Or mapping out a model of the war on drugs and showing that while having the police capturing and getting rid of some drug-lords may help reduce the availability of those drugs, this also drives the price of the drugs up for the consumers (we assume the graph is inelastic meaning there will be little change as far as how much is actually is consumed after rates increase, I mean the consumers are addicted! they're gonna pay whatever they have to to get it!) as a result making the remaining drug-lords even richer still. A lot goes into the decision making our leaders have to make! It's not nearly as simple as we think it is sometimes..

When you're able to apply something you're studying, like econ, to your life that otherwise would be mundane if you didn't, it really brings it to life and makes it worth studying. For example, I'm actually reading the textbook assignments! (I mean taking ample breaks of course, now for example ;) but still (had to get that wink in there cait :) ))

Here's another real-life econ example of my own: Looking at the trade-offs I face in sleeping in a little or waking up early to play basketball I've analyzed the opportunity costs associated to each. If i wake up early that will result in receiving less sleep, which will increase the drowsiness my already sleepy self has been experiencing because of the negative externality I face of having a roommate that snores when he sleeps. Needless to say my basketball skills haven't improved much since coming, but at least my understanding of econ has.. Now i just gotta balance the two out till we reach the point of equilibrium! :)