Tjalling Koopmans Econ 490 fall 2019

There are several examples of team production that I can think of that relate to at least one of the New York Times articles. The first example will be buying a gift for someone. In our family, it is expected that everyone buy a person’s birthday gift with their own money, or pay equal parts in a more expensive gift. This relates to the article about “sharing the marbles” and fairness, both in effort and reward. The effort in this example is the personal amount of money that an individual spends, while the reward is being able to claim that the gift came from you. There are times where one person will pay the full price of the gift but include everyone’s name in it, but this is done with the agreement that everyone else will compensate the buyer with what they would have payed had they all purchased it together. Although this is not the only time when team production occurs in my family. Another instance of team production would be when my father, my brother and I all assembled a dr...

I have been aware of risks to my income for some time and have determined many of my actions in the past, present and future to be based around the least amount of risk to achieve the most preferable outcome. Even choosing to come to this university over all the other ones I had been accepted to was a choice where I took my future into consideration. While it is true that I would need to take out more loans to come here than some of the other schools due to the amount I would receive in aid and scholarships, I still choose to come here as it meant that there was a higher likelihood of being able to get a job that pays enough money to remove these debts within a couple of years. Additionally, my actions since I first began attending the university of Illinois have also been made with thoughts towards the future. While I did intend to originally major in computer science and get a job coding software, I ended up declaring for a major in sociology with a minor in economics. Despite thi...

Looking back through my blog posts, I find that they are unrelated to each other. While at least part of it can be attributed to my blog posts being incorrect about the topics at hand, the actual topics themselves seemed unrelated in the first place. No real connections to the course are present beyond just answering the prompts. The topics discussed in the posts are only brought up in class after the fact so any overlapping examples that might possibly exist in any of these posts or any future posts would be entirely coincidental. To my understanding, things like opportunism and management have nothing to do with each other. This is not the only way in which my blog posts feel disconnected. The blog posts also feel disconnected from the themes of the course. This may be in part to my understanding of the themes and the lack thereof but the point still stands. Perhaps it is just due to the way I learn but for me, learning the fundamental principles and concepts of something through ...

While the idea of illinibucks is a rather interesting scenario, some further specifications of the scenario itself need to be made before a conclusion can be drawn. For example, how much each service costs, do all services cost the same amount, and how many illinibucks are allocated to each student all play a factor in how I would spend them. For the sake of this blog post we will presume that the flat total of illinibucks is 1000 per semester and that each service has its own price. In the rest of the post, I shall mention what services I believe that this hypothetical policy should be applied to as well as how I would use them and any possible consequences of a price that is too high or too low.  As far as services go, I feel that illinibucks are applicable to just about any service that does not already have a priority allocation system. That includes things like using the computer labs, renting things from the various dorms, the use of private rooms in student libraries and ...