Follow up on "Utility, Taxes, Poverty, and Equality"

In yesterday's post, I talked about Mankiw's critique of utilitarianism justified income transfers. One of the things that disappointed me about most responses on the internet is that they didn't grapple with the philosophical argument Mankiw was advancing. That's why I was happy to read Noah Smith's response where he takes on the "just desserts" framework that Mankiw proposes to replace the utilitarian thinking.

Mankiw's economist arch-rival, Noah Smith! 

Smith's post is definitely worth a read, but I think he's still missing Mankiw's point. Smith interprets Mankiw's theory as saying that whatever the market allocates is what constitutes one's just desserts, but that's not what Mankiw is getting at. Instead, Mankiw is saying that if we want to take money from the rich and give it to the poor, we should do it only insofar as it seems fair, instead of saying, "poor dude Y gets more utility from consumption than CEO X! Given that CEO X's elasticity of labor supply is 0.43, we should tax 34.8% of his income to theoretically maximize utility."

Although I think Mankiw does favor less redistribution than bloggers like Noah Smith or myself, I think his essay was misnamed. Mankiw is not proposing (at least not so much in that article) that we redistribute less, he's merely saying we should argue about redistribution using a different framework. As the professor himself writes,

"This alternative perspective [just desserts] on the income distribution is a radical departure from the utilitarian perspective that has long influenced economists, including Okun and Mirrlees. But it is not entirely new. It harkens back about a century to the tradition of “just taxation” suggested by Knut Wicksell (1896, translated 1958) and Erik Lindahl (1919, translated 1958). More important, I believe it is more consistent with our innate moral intuitions. Indeed, many of the arguments of the left discussed earlier are easier to reconcile with the just-deserts theory than they are with utilitarianism. My disagreement with the left lies not in the nature of their arguments, but rather in the factual basis of their conclusions."

Or as he wrote in a 2010 piece on a similar topic,

"In the end, I don’t think the Just Deserts Theory necessarily calls for radical changes
in policy toward taxes and income distribution. It does, however, suggest that we
focus on a different set of questions when thinking about policy design. A utilitarian
asks how quickly marginal utility falls as income rises and how much people respond
to the disincentive effects of redistributive tax policy. A Just Deserts Theorist admits
that questions regarding utility functions and incentive effects may enter into the
analysis, but they are the wrong place to start. Rather, he begins by asking whether
people’s compensation reflects the contributions they make to society and how much
they benefit from government actions."

 Now, I think Mankiw is wrong and that utilitarianism is an important part of justifying income redistribution, as I discussed in my previous post.

Utility, Taxes, Equality, and Poverty

Head of the Harvard economics department, former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for George W. Bush, Romney campaign economic advisor, and author of the most popular undergraduate economics textbook recently caused quite a stir in the economics blogosphere with his "Defending the One Percent". In his article, Mankiw lays out the usual utilitarian case economists make for redistribution, casts some doubt on these utilitarian principles, and finally suggests that instead of looking at redistribution from a utilitarian perspective we should focus on a "just desserts" approach that assesses fairness more broadly when taxing and spending.

What do we mean by a "utilitarian" argument for redistribution. Well, (and I'm sure a philosophy professor would be horrified by the brief description I'm about to give), utilitarianism holds that when anyone does something, they gain a certain amount of goodness or utility (think pleasure, but more broadly) from that action. What is right, then, is whatever maximizes utility for everyone. Anyone who has taken economics is familiar with the concept of the law of diminishing marginal utility, the idea that the more of something you consume the less utility you get from each additional unit of consumption. Quick note, marginal means to do one more of something. This principle provides the underpinning for microeconomics and all those demand curves you're always hearing about. When we apply diminishing marginal utility to wealth, we conclude that a thousand dollars provides a lot less utility to a millionaire than it does to a family living in poverty. Thus, the right thing to do from a utilitarian perspective is to take some money from that millionaire and give it to the family living in poverty, thus increasing total utility.

Greg Mankiw, evil economist 

Of course, as Mankiw and many economists before him have pointed out, we cannot just perfectly transfer wealth because of something else economists love talking about: incentives. If I tell someone that I will take 40% of every marginal dollar they earn, they're going to earn fewer dollars than if they got to keep the full fruits of their labor. The result is that there's less wealth to spread around, less work gets done, and we have a poorer nation. The famous economist Arthur Okun came up with the idea of a "leaky bucket" to describe redistribution because moving wealth with taxes loses some money along the way just as moving water with a leaky bucket loses some water. Thus, economists believe that there is a tradeoff between equity and efficiency. Theoretically, there's some ideal point that maximizes utility through taxation.

Anyone who has looked much into economics and redistribution is familiar with these arguments. Mankiw's somewhat novel contribution is to call the whole utilitarian framework, and some of its commonly assumed conclusions, into question. He makes three notes:

1) We can't actually measure differences in utility between individuals, so it's impossible to know if we're actually redistributing income from those who get less utility to those who get more.
2) Really, to maximize utility, we should be taxing based on some attribute that is heavily correlated with income, like height, race, or gender instead of income itself. Because these are fixed characteristics, there will be no disincentive effects and yet we'll still get money from the rich to the poor! Obviously, this is a solution no one would be happy with.
3) Utilitarianism says that if it weren't for incentive effects, perfect equality would maximize utility. Most of us don't think though that everyone should have the same wealth regardless of how hard they work, we feel that hard work should be rewarded, incentive effects aside.

Mankiw argues that because utilitarianism leads us to some conclusions we're uncomfortable with, maybe we shouldn't use it so quickly to support progressive taxation. When envisioning his just society, Mankiw writes,

The role of government arises as the economy departs from this classical benchmark. Pigovian taxes and subsidies are necessary to correct externalities, and progressive income taxes can be justified to finance public goods based on the benefits principle. Transfer payments to the poor have a role as well, because fighting poverty can be viewed as a public good (Thurow 1971). 

Many commentators have critiqued Mankiw's piece, but I agree with Mat Nolan when he writes that most of these responses didn't really engage with the substance of Mankiw's argument about utilitarianism. I think Mankiw gives utilitarianism short shrift. I'm uncomfortable with dismissing a conceptual framework just because it leads to some surprising conclusions. Furthermore, you can dismiss height taxes without abandoning utilitarianism just by noting that an arbitrary height tax would lead to riots in the streets, and that surely wouldn't be maximizing utility. Furthermore, as Yglesias writes, you can't get very far in economics without leaning on utility to some extent. The notions of public goods, taxing pollution and other externalities, and the efficiency of the competitive equilibrium are all based on the premise of maximizing utility. Maybe we can't use utilitarianism to figure out every little thing, but it is a pretty useful framework for figuring out how to produce and consume society's resources in an efficient manner, and I think that includes wealth redistribution.

I do think that Mankiw's argument implies that we should be less certain of the good of wealth redistribution than many on the left are. Sometimes, the reason for the gap between a given rich and poor person is that the rich person gets more utility from consumption and so chose to pursue longer work hours and more education. Redistribution in this case may be moving money from someone who values money more to someone who values it less (think of the college student becomes a doctor to get rich and the other who goes into art because they don't really care about money). Obviously, this isn't always or maybe even often the case, but it is there and should remind us that redistribution runs into more problems than just disincentive effects.

Furthermore, I think that we are far too concerned with equality in the United States. Once you're making twenty thousand dollars a year, you are wealthy by global standards. I think the difference in the marginal value of a dollar between a wealthy person and a lower middle class person in the US is so low that we the efficiency-equity tradeoff may stop being worth it much sooner than most progressives think. On the other hand, this only makes the case for global aid even stronger. Obviously, aid can be ineffective because of all the difficulties of creating major international programs and operating in very poor areas. So, it does make sense that governments do more to help their own where the taxpayers will feel less disgruntled about giving up their money and it will be (somewhat) easier to establish effective programs. Nonetheless, we should spend more on foreign aid than we do now and we should spend more time figuring out what works in development.

One of the most disturbing implications of utilitarianism is that we should help these people even though they can't vote!

Finally, we should focus more on real poverty in the United States instead of "defending the middle class". Instead of endless debates about the gap between the 1% and everyone else, our precious middle class social security benefits and unions, our mortgage interest tax credit, and the gini coefficient, we should think about the people who really fall between the cracks in society. Rather than waste resources shifting money around between the global rich in America, we should spend more to help those who cannot help themselves due to serious mental health issues and crippling poverty. As even Mankiw admits in his essay, poor children in America are likely not receiving the education and development they deserve or need to become productive members of society, so we should work on making sure our investments in families and education are up to par. I think Scott Sumner hit the nail on the head when he wrote,

I recently heard a progressive criticize Obama.  He started his comments by saying something like “If progressivism stands for anything, it stands for helping the middle class.”  What?!?!  Those sentiments are truly disgusting, repulsive.  The focus should be on hunger in America.  I hate to sound like an aging baby boomer, but at least in the 1960s the middle class was perceived by progressives as the enemy, unwilling to share their money and perks with poor black people.  That’s not entirely accurate either, but at least it’s not morally repulsive.

The precious middle class

I think utilitarianism is a valid defense of progressive taxation, but it is a weaker and different kind of defense than most on the left believe. Also, Mankiw's piece is well worth reading, it includes all kinds of interesting tidbits about how economists think of equality. I plan on reading Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality to see if he can convince me to care more about inequality than I do now.

Eli T. Iceman's "Power Grid Operations"

Before this May, my only interest in the power grid came from the board game of the same name (which, by the way, is excellent). However, all of that changed when the group I'm collaborating with on an interdisciplinary research project settled on the topic of the U.S power grid.

Cool board game

In order to familiarize ourselves with the grid, we settled on "Power Grid Operations" by Eli T. Iceman as a common reading. Eli T. Iceman, by the way, is just a pen name and apparently a mnemonic used by physicists and electrical engineers. I was expecting the book to be a bit of a slog, but was pleasantly surprised by Iceman's work. The book was readable, avoided getting caught up in technical jargon, thorough, and peppered with interesting anecdotes and the occasional joke that kept my interest. 

Cool Book

What surprised me most though is how interesting the power grid is! I loved learning about the different parts of the grid, so that when I drive down the highway I no longer say, "look another wire electricity thing", but instead, "oh, a transmission line, and there's a distribution line, and over there it connects to a substation!" Iceman is a longtime grid operator, one of the people who balances electricity generation and distribution to make sure all the lights stay on and equipment doesn't start failing. He offers an interesting perspective on the job. The task of power grid operators appealed to me for much the same reason meteorology sounded interesting in Nate Silver's "The Signal and the Noise"; it combines mathematical modeling and computer simulations with fast paced, somewhat subjective decision making. 

If you want to learn about something that you never thought was interesting (but is) and affects every facet of your life, I highly recommend "Power Grid Operations". It will change the way you think of turning on the lights. 

Also, on the subject of my research project, I hope to keep posting updates about that throughout the summer, so stay tuned! 

AidGrade

This summer, I have the pleasure of interning at AidGrade, a marvelous non-profit startup run by developmental economist Eva Vivalt. The organization's goal is gathering all of the available impact analyses on different developmental aid programs - things like giving out insecticide treated bed nets or water sanitation. AidGrade then conduct meta-analyses, which are attempts to combine results from multiple papers to get a better perspective of what works and what doesn't work.

I first became involved with AidGrade last summer when I helped Eva with a kickstarter for a book on  ten meta-analyses of different aid programs. I helped find all the pertinent articles for the different topics, and later I helped gather the data that was in the papers. The project was meaningful, interesting, and gave me some valuable research experience. Eva published her book and went on to turn the project into the AidGrade organization. When I heard that AidGrade was looking for interns this summer, I applied and was happy to come aboard.

So far, I've been doing a lot of the same things for the organization as I did when we were working on the kickstarter book, but later on I might get to become more involved with communication and writing about findings. Eva was recently interviewd by the blog 80000 hours about AidGrade, and the interview contains all sorts of interesting information about the group and her inspiration for starting it. One interesting part of the interview was the discussion of the roles of developmental economics and meta-analyses in the wider economics sphere. As Eva states, neither is considered a "sexy" topic these days. Many of the hot shot economists are drawn to very mathematically rigorous areas of microeconomics or the politically controversial realms of macroeconomics. As for meta-analyses, most ambitious academic economists are concerned primarily with producing novel research rather than synthesizing old results.

Needless to say, the economic issues of development need intelligent researchers to investigate them as well! It is fascinating and baffling that even though we have the technology necessary to allow people to be very productive and enjoy high standards of living, much of the world lives in abject poverty. Then there's the whole question of how to encourage people to give, where people should give, and how to convince policy makers to stop being stupid. Eva touches on all of these topics in the very interesting interview, and more at her blog.

I'm not sure if I want to go into developmental economics, at this point I'm still trying to get a sense for what the different fields of economics are like, or even if I want to go to economics graduate school. I am very happy to be at AidGrade so that I can learn all about developmental economics, especially since it's a field that tends to get marginalized. If you want to learn more about developmental economics in general, I recommend buying Eva's book that I linked to above or watching through some of Marginal Revolution University's lessons developmental economics.

The Sopranos and our Golden Age of Entertainment

Tyler Cowen frequently and convincingly argues that over the past forty years or so, the United States has been going through a period of relative innovation stagnation in medicine, transportation, and education. But one area where the U.S has seen rapid (and under appreciated) growth is in entertainment.

The death of James Gandolfini, star of HBO's hit series The Sopranos, got me thinking about entertainment and led me to realize that we are living through a golden age of entertainment. Matthew Yglesias has summarized this shift well, writing:

"Traditional American television, after all, was built atop an economic structure in which trying to make a really good show simply didn't make sense...In the three-network paradigm, what you wanted from a show was broad, shallow appeal...The Sopranos showed that television intended to aim for high quality and deep audience loyalty could be broadly popular as well if it was done right."

The Sopranos is brilliant because of its incredible cinematography, acting, and writing, things that most consider lost on the general television viewing public. Yet, The Sopranos managed to be artistic, profitable, and popular, leading to the high quality shows like Sherlock, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad that populate T.V today.

But the golden age of entertainment extends beyond T.V quality. Technology has given us unprecedented access to the things we love. My roommate can watch all his favorite animes for free the night they air in Japan. I can access almost any book I want in under five minutes for less than ten dollars (in many cases, for free). Technology has increased the supply of entertainment so dramatically that we are now inundated with it, often at quite low prices. I see this as having several upshots:

1) We should never be bored
We can listen to the best music of any era, read the best books of any era, watch the best T.V shows or movies of any era. Why should never have nothing to do. Once we start to define entertainment more broadly, this golden age only gets better. Why not learn something new for free from some of the world's greatest academics? Why not connect with people who share some specific interest of yours?

I'm not trying to say this so as to sound superior to people who are occasionally bored. I'm occasionally bored. But, we should recognize that we are not bored because we have nothing to do. We are bored because we get stuck in the inertia of doing nothing and are too lazy to access something stimulating. That is a much more solvable problem than actually having nothing entertaining to do.

2) Don't complain that society doesn't have enough "art"
I can picture some objections to me saying everything is hunky dory in this age of entertainment. "Yeah, man," some malcontent might say to me, "maybe the corporate fatcats are providing all the entertainment that the sheeple need while lining their pockets, but what about true art man?" While I can't claim that art as defined by college professors is in a golden age, I think it is fair to say that our ability to access that art is in a golden age. Want to explore the sistine ceiling? Go do it. Want to read almost any poem every written? Knock yourself out.

"But man," insists the hippy, "what about real art, you know, the stuff you need to experience in person." Kalamazoo is no po-dunk town, but it's also no cultural mecca, and yet even here I'd argue you can experience plenty of "real" art. Several theaters, an art museum, art hop on first fridays of every month, live music everywhere, colleges where you can go see student art exhibitions, ect. The vast majority of people in the U.S undoubtedly live within a few hours of some city where they could have a meaningful artistic experience. Even if this level of art isn't quite where some would like it, we still have more accessible for most people than it's ever been before.

On a similar vein, advertisements, that other bane of those concerned with the quality of entertainment in America, are much more avoidable in this golden age than they've ever been before. For one dollar a day you can completely avoid advertisements on radio and t.v. Download adblock plus on google chrome to completely remove ads from the internet.

We are living in a golden age of entertainment. Go forth and enjoy it!

I am a Pinball Wizard

As you may have heard, my dad recently updated the family pinball table, Banzai Run. The old lights have been replaced with LED ones that really shine, all the sounds are working, and the machine plays as closely to how it did when I was eight as it ever will. We still have to reset the extra balls so they come every million (currently it's every 1.2 million), and then, in the interest of starting with a blank slate, reset the high score table. Before the update, I held all four high scores, three of which were greater than the maximum score the machine can show (9999999).

Third and fourth high score before the game.

For Father's Day, dad and I decided to play a game of Banzai Run. We haven't figured out how to reset the table yet, so we just decided to play with the old extra ball and high score settings. My first ball drained right away, but then I found my footing, eventually beating the king three times and crossing the finish line. I ended the game with about 15 million, which rolled over to 9999999, putting all four of my high scores at the table's supremum. I'd say it was a pretty good game to christen the updated table.

Third and fourth high score after the game.

For my brothers' sakes, I guess it is time to reset the high scores. But, they'd better bring up their game if they want to spend much time on the high score table.

Hotline Miami

Today I finished Hotline Miami, a top down action game I picked up in the latest Humble Indie Bundle. I ended up spending 8 hours on the game and the whole time was an immensely enjoyable experience thanks to the game's challenge, music, and unique aesthetic feel.

Gamespot has a good video review up that's worth watching if you want more information. The challenging nature of the game reminded me of Super Meat Boy, and Gamespot makes the same exact comparison. A single blow kills you, so you have to plan carefully to surprise your enemies or lure them into traps. Any misstep results in death and forces you to restart the level. However, much like in Super Meat Boy, the constant replaying is less a frustration and more a challenge. You have to perfect the execution of every aspect of a level in order to beat it, and when all the pieces finally click, the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment is intense.

Besides fun gameplay, Hotline Miami offers an original feel that I think can best be described as neon grime. The story is (sort of) about Russian mob violence, so there's your grime, but the soundtrack is a throbbing techno dance mix heavily inspired by the 80s that creates the neon feel. The music, by the way, is excellent and won two awards in 2012. Vivid colors and surreal storytelling create a trance that fits perfectly with the frenzied repetition that's required to beat the game. Also, the game is gory. Really gory.

This is one of the least gory gameplay pictures I could find. 

A quick note about the Humble Indie Bundle: if you're not buying them, you're crazy. Each bundle comes with a handful of indie games for which you can pay whatever you want, even if that's only one cent. If you pay at least a dollar, you get codes to put the games on steam. If you pay more than the average, which is usual 5-8 dollars, you get a few extra games, soundtracks for the games, and other goodies. No matter what you pay, all the games are DRM free and your links to download them will be permanently stored on an account at the humble bundle website. It's often worth paying above the average when some truly excellent games appear, and it's always worth paying a dollar to get 5 or 6 new games on Steam. You can sign up at the link to learn when the next bundle comes out, and they constantly have weekly sales.

Biking along the Kal-Haven obstacle course

As part of my ongoing effort to avoid obesity and death, I decided to look around for places where I can run and bike over the summer. I was delighted to discover that the start of the Kal-Haven trail is only an eight minute drive from my house. The Kal-Haven trail is a roughly 35 mile gravel bike path that connects Kalamazoo and South Haven, making it long enough to meet all of my exercise needs. So on Friday, I decided to throw my bike in the car and head on over to do a bit of biking.

As I began my ride, I learned that the massive thunder storm that hit Kalamazoo on Wednesday had not left the Kal-Haven trail unscathed. Debris from nearby trees littered the trail, and after about five minutes of biking, I came across a fallen tree blocking the entire path. I got off my bike, lifted it up, and clambered over the trunk and around branches. Five minutes later, I hit another tree. During my hour and a half ride, I'd say I encountered about two dozen fallen trees. And they were not small trees.

See? Not small. 

Every time I encountered someone heading the other way, we'd always stop and engage in a ritual where we remarked on how many fallen trees there were (a lot), asked if there were more in the direction we were heading (there were), and then wished each other a happy run/ride. The general impression I got is that most people thought the tree situation was kind of exciting. It broke up the monotony of the run/ride and let you exercise in a different way. Getting my bike through some of the more tangled trees required a bit of strategizing and creativity.

I had to climb off the trail through the valley to get around this tree. 

Besides the fallen trees, the trail was very nice. There's plenty of shade, sources of water, and outhouses. Plus, I encountered some very beautiful views. I think I'll be using the Kal-Haven trail often this summer, although it may have fewer trees the next time I go down it.

What has made K great for me: my friends

With my last exam out of the way, I am officially halfway through college. Given that I'm going to be spending my entire junior year in London, I'm actually two thirds of the way through my time at K! As I take stock of my college experiences so far, I think that this school has greatly exceeded my expectations. The reason that K has been better than I hoped is not the classes, or professors, or community (all of which have been great), but rather the friends I've made.

I knew that I had a found some real gems in fall quarter of freshmen year when we successfully brought Wolf Awareness Week to Kalamazoo College (see more about that here), and I came to love my friends more as our shenanigans expanded. The best thing about my friends is that they're always willing to do something instead of just sitting around. There's always someone willing to watch or play something new, travel somewhere on an "adventure", or organize a massive game of Humans Versus Zombies. No matter what, there's something exciting going on!

And my girlfriend Riley has pushed my college experience into places I didn't think I'd ever go! Thanks to her support, I've run a half-marathon, camped on the sleeping bear dunes in the middle of the winter, and hiked around the Smoky Mountains for two weeks. I would be a lazier and lamer person if it weren't for her.

My suite mates and friends! There are many more friends who are not pictured and have helped make my time at K an excellent experience.

I'm excited to have new experiences abroad, but I know that I'll never again have anything quite like these last two years. I'm going to miss my adventures with my friends next year.

Sodexo, Creative Dining, Monopoly, and Duopoly: Food at K

Food service is changing rapidly at Kalamazoo College. Sodexo, our current food provider, had its contract come up for renewal this year, and to many students' surprise, they were rejected in favor of Creative Dining. Next year, Creative Dining will take over the cafeteria as well as the sandwich cafe and all catering services in our student center. There's been a lot of grumbling about Sodexo during my time here at K, and most students seem glad to see it go.

As if this weren't enough, we learned on Friday that Biggby, the coffee shop in our library, will be replaced by a coffee shop provided through Creative Dining. I was surprised to learn that many students are upset over Biggby's demise. Biggby is a chain coffee shop whereas Creative Dining has promised to get some sort of local thing going with our coffee. Plus Biggby's ice machine has been broken for the past week or so during one of the hottest weeks of the academic year at K. I guess they must have built up some brand loyalty. 

Food service is a contentious issue at K, I think, because there are so many competing interests that want different things out of our cafeteria. I don't think it's a stretch to assume that K has a disproportionate number of vegetarians and vegans in our student body, most of whom are unsatisfied with the options available to them. In addition, K has many students who are especially concerned over whether our food is organic and local, and about how the workers who harvest it are treated. You have some students who come from wealthier backgrounds and wouldn't mind paying extra for premium food, but others who are taking out heavy loans as it is and want to save on food. To get a wide variety of vegetarian and vegan options, you have to search outside of Michigan and work through Monsanto and other big agricultural producers. Obviously, the budget students and the premium students can't both get what they want. Plus, buying local and organic instead of where the best deal is raises costs. These tensions are exacerbated by the fact that K only has one cafeteria and a small student body, making it hard to get variety and take advantage of efficiencies of scale that can bring down price. The result is that it's impossible to get a food service that will satisfy everyone. 

Will Creative Dining be an improvement? I don't know, but I think that question misses the far more important issue, which is the structural reason for K's unsatisfying food service. The fact is, there is no competition that drives down prices, drives up quality, or makes our food service provider more responsive to student demands. Sodexo and Biggby enjoyed a nice duopoly when it came to food and drink provision on campus. Anyone who wanted catering had to go through Sodexo, and every student who lived on campus was required to spend thousands of dollars, at a minimum, to purchase meal swipes to the cafeteria. On top of this, every student with a meal plan is required to buy at least some "munch money", which is essentially where you pay extra money and then can only spend it at Stacks, Papa Johns, or Biggby. So, every student is basically forced to buy food service gift cards that can only be spent through Sodexo or Biggby (or Papa Johns, which also screws over munch money users, but that's a topic for a later post). 

So if I could redesign K's food system with a magic wand, what would I do? 

1) Increase our student size until we can get a second cafeteria run by a different food provider, or at least expand our current cafeteria to contain more options 

2) Make it so that Stacks is run by a separate company and so that anyone can cater in Hicks

3) Keep our coffee shop in the library independent 

4) Eliminate munch money 

On #1, we are slowly increasing the size of the student body, so maybe there will be some progress on that front. The fact that Biggby is going to become a Creative Dining affiliate is bad news on the #3 front. As I learned in Intermediate Microeconomics and Industrial Organization and Public Policy, a duopoly is usually much better for consumers than a monopoly, and that's exactly what Creative Dining will have. I can only hope that Creative Dining will have different munch money policies or maybe let someone else run Stacks, but that seems very pie-in-the-sky for now. 

I won't deal with any of these changes to the K food system until my senior year, at which point I'll be living and cooking off campus. However, I'll still probably stop by Stacks for lunch and get coffee from the cafe every once in awhile. It'll be interesting to see how the changes shake out. 

See you later K classes

Today marks the last time I'll sit through a lecture at Kalamazoo College until I come back from London for my senior year in September of 2014. My last class, Industrial Organization and Public Policy, ended with a very interesting lecture on the beer industry (although I wish we'd had time to talk about prohibition).

After my last sophomore class, I played in my last sophomore jazz band concert. On the last day of classes in spring quarter, the cafeteria always serves dinner on the quad while the jazz band performs - we call it "Burgers and Blues". Last year, we had to play inside the cafeteria due to weather, but today it was bright and sunny.

The students of Kalamazoo College enjoying some burgers and blues before exam week

It's always fun to see people enjoying your music as a backdrop for other activities. The concert atmosphere is more relaxed when your audience is eating and laughing while you play. There is a distinctly different sound to playing outside, and I think it put us a little off balance compared to our indoor concert a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, I thought the performance went well and was a great way to wrap up my sophomore year.

It's odd to think that the next time I step into a class at K I'll be a senior worried about my SIP and (probably) graduate school. I am getting a little ahead of myself though; before I can call this year over, I still have to take my exams!

Too Many Cookies

For Kalamazoo College students, this is the infamous tenth week, the last full week of classes before exams. For many students, tenth week means a bunch of papers and presentations to prepare. As a math and economics major, this is actually a less stressful week for me because I have no big projects due and my upcoming finals are basically just a few more midterms. 

Besides stressed students, another hallmark of tenth week is ample quantities of delivery food. Every student organization is given $300 dollars per year to spend on "group bonding" (if you are wondering why college tuition keeps going up, this may be part of the answer). Usually, this money goes unspent until the final week when every student organization turns their last meeting into a lavish feast. 

Insomnia Cookies, which just came to Kalamazoo this year, has been having a good week. I ordered 100 cookies from them for Board Game Club, 24 cookies for Economics and Business Club, and when I came to my last Swing Dance Club meeting there was a box of cookies waiting. 

A sampling of the Insomnia Cookies at Board Game Club

The cookies really are quite good. They're delivered hot and gooey, and made with plenty of butter. In addition to the Insomnia Cookies, I've had crab rangoons, shwarma, and pizza this week. When you have $300 to spend, you might as well get a lot of food. I think I might have to do a bit of running to work off all of this free food though. 

Welcome to Nerd's Eye View!

Welcome to my blog, Nerd's Eye View. This blog will mostly be about my life at K and, once I leave, my experiences abroad. I'll also occasionally share interesting things I've read and my opinions on political and economic news.

I'm currently a sophomore at Kalamazoo College studying math and economics. In October I'll be heading overseas for a year abroad at the London School of Economics. I hope that this blog will be a good way for my friends and family to keep up with what I'm doing and for me to chronicle my experiences.

Hope you enjoy reading!