The Dismal Educators

Krugman on the US housing bubble

This is why you should not buy Real Estate.

Paul Krugman on the rich getting richer

Link to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve site.

I was looking through various pages the fed has and found an old speech from June 1999 on Economic Literacy. I saw the following quote by Alice Rivlin and it made me wonder if this is how my students see my lectures. Those who have read do not have this problem but those that have not may!?

"Economic literacy is akin to having a working knowledge of a foreign language. If you are with a group of foreigners and don't speak their language at all, especially if its sounds and intonations are strange and unfamiliar to your ears, you tune out. You feel excluded, perhaps uneasy. If you have a rudimentary working knowledge of the language, you can at least follow the drift of the conversation, ask a few questions and feel that, even if you are not getting the fine points, you are not totally left out and you have a basis for acquiring more knowledge. That, it seems to me, is what economic literacy means—a rudimentary working knowledge of the concepts and language of economic activity and economic policy."

How much of rudimentary working knowledge do they have? Can I congratulate myself on discussing terminology and boring the heck out of my students before moving on to exciting debates?

Greenspan's Retirement

The legacy of Greenspan Housing Bubble

Professor on Credentialism

Two stories on NPR Marketplace caught my attention: The first story was about the Chinese investing in the U.S. which reminds me of the Japanese in the 1980's buying Real Estate in U.S.
The Second story (commentary) is by Adam Hanft. He pointed out:

"People are positively jubilant about spending time and effort to create
videos or discover them, and then post them for free.But why? There's no
economic benefit to them. And that defies classic economic theory that says we
are all rational beings and act only in our own self-interest."

This will make an interesting discussion with the students.

This is from Dropping Knowledge. I will use this in class when I start teaching about money.
The Answer: Because it is a medium of exchange?

A student asked me about the stock market and I did not have a good answer. I feared giving bad advice and him losing money and getting sued.
I am going to direct him to Peter Navaro's site and have him listen to the lectures.

I ran across this site for educators. I need to look at this site and decide if there is anything useful there or not.
Also a great site for the students is http://www.isbnspy.com/

Colbert Welcomes Henry Kissinger Back to the White House

The more we think that things are changing the more they are the same!

Another excellent economist has decided to blog. I know that I will like MacroMind because he will ask questions that are relevant to our students. Also he is responsible for me being a dismal educator. He is responsible for my interest in economics as a subject, and he was one of the first people to encourage me to teach. Go toMacromind

John Kenneth Galbraith is one of my favorite economists. I remembered that he had coined the term "conventional Wisdom" . Searching for the original quote I ran across the following quote of his "The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."
You can see the above proven slowly but surely in the political news.

This is another proof of Mr. Friedman's Hypothesis that the world is flat. Will online classes be taught from India? why not?

Story--Courtesy Reuters
U.S. homework outsourced as "e-tutoring" grows

By Jason Szep Thu Sep 28, 10:43 AM ET

BOSTON (Reuters) - Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour -- in India.

"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English -- a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.

"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks' coffee," Robison said. "We did our own form of summer school all summer."

The outsourcing trend that fueled a boom in Asian call centers staffed by educated, low-paid workers manning phones around the clock for U.S. banks and other industries is moving fast into an area at the heart of U.S. culture: education.

It comes at a difficult time for the U.S. education system: only two-thirds of teenagers graduate from high school, a proportion that slides to 50 percent for black Americans and Hispanics, according to government statistics.

China and India, meanwhile, are producing the world's largest number of science and engineering graduates -- at least five times as many as in the United States, where the number has fallen since the early 1980s.

Parents using schools like Taylor's say they are doing whatever they can to give children an edge that can lead to better marks, better colleges and a better future, even if it comes with an Indian accent about 9,000 miles away.

SLANG & AMERICAN ACCENTS

"We've changed the paradigm of tutoring," said Krishnan Ganesh, founder and chairman of TutorVista, which offers subjects ranging from grammar to geometry for children as young as 6 years old to adults in college.

"It's not that the U.S. education system is not good. It's just that it's impossible to give personalized education at an affordable cost unless you use technology, unless you use the Internet and unless you can use lower-cost job centers like India," he said over a crackly Internet-phone line from Bangalore. "We can deliver that."

Many of the tutors have masters degrees in their subjects, said Ganesh. On average, they have taught for 10 years. Each undergoes 60 hours of training, including lessons on how to speak in a U.S. accent and how to decipher American slang.

They are schooled on U.S. history and state curricula, and work in mini-call centers or from their homes across India. One operates out of Hong Kong, teaching the Chinese language.

As with other Indian e-tutoring firms such as Growing Stars Inc., students log on to TutorVista's Web site and are assigned lessons by tutors who communicate using voice-over-Internet technology and an instant messaging window. They share a simulated whiteboard on their computers.

Denise Robison said Taylor had trouble understanding her tutor's accent at first. "Now that she is used to it, it doesn't bother her at all," she said.

TutorVista launched a British service in August and Ganesh said he plans to expand into China in December to tap demand for English lessons from China's booming middle class. In 2007, he plans to launch Spanish-language lessons and build on Chinese and French lessons already offered.

A New Delhi tutoring company, Educomp Solutions Ltd., estimates the U.S. tutoring market at $8 billion and growing. Online companies, both from the United States and India, are looking to tap millions of dollars available to firms under the U.S. No Child Left Behind Act for remedial tutoring.

Teachers unions hope to stop that from happening.

"Tutoring providers must keep in frequent touch with not only parents but classroom teachers and we believe there is greater difficulty in an offshore tutor doing that," said Nancy Van Meter, a director at the American Federation of Teachers.

But No Child Left Behind, a signature Bush administration policy, encourages competition among tutoring agencies and leaves the door open for offshore tutors, said Diane Stark Rentner of the Center on Education Policy in Washington.

"The big test is whether the kids are actually learning. Until you answer that, I don't know if you can pass judgment on whether this is a good or bad way to go," she said.
Read the Article

Yale economist Robert Shiller argues that the stock market is explained by investor psychology, not the internet or globalization as others claim. Shiller forecast the collapse of the last bubble in 2000 and offers insight here into assessing risk in the 21st century. Series: "Economics Roundtable" [Public Affairs]

This is my lecture on Demand based on Textbook by David Colander. Using Google to put up my lectures.

You Tube is blocked on our campus, so some of the video links are not visible on campus.
The school blocks My Space too. However, the students organization are using it and coming up with new groups all the time. A college trustee has a myspace account. He can be found in the Rio Hondo Past and Present Group.
The AGS Group post was interesting:
"... we have been having some technical difficulties with our normal Rio Hondo AGS website and so what the heck; why not create a myspace for AGS? Everyone has a myspace (well almost) and lets be frank; they check it constantly, forcing administrators at Rio Hondo to ban myspace entirely. Consequently, we figured this would be a great and quickest way to reach our members, discuss upcoming events, announce deadlines, and etc....!"

Myspace Groups

Oh I set up a MySpace account too. I am Economisto! And I found this Video there:Posted By:Econ311

Get this video and more at MySpace.com

Economics Video

This is a very creative way of teaching fiscal policy.
Somebody flagged it on Youtube but it is clean!

Fishball explained with Economics

Is this Mandarin or Cantonese? Is it accurate?