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Lecture Notes / New School / Teaching — No Comments
24
Mar 10

Mathematica as a Foundation for Economic Analysis

In response to a few email requests, I’m putting these lecture notes from an old Mathematica course up here. I’ve updated them to work with the latest version of Mathematica.

Lecture notes for the Mathematica as a foundation for economic analysis course at the Newschool for Social Research in 2005 are here in Mathematica notebook format. The main set of notes are in .nb, as people may need access to some of the code I’ve written in the appendices for other things  they might like to do.

Course Outline

Update 24.4.2010. Five years later, and people still want these things. Wow. Here are version 0.9 of the notes in zipped .nb format. Most of the functions aren’t evaluated. Just about everything should work with Mathematica 7. You’re free to do what you want with these notes, but please give credit where it is due. Email me if you spot a bug or a typo, I’ll fix these every 6 months or so.

Mathematica_Course_Lecture_Notes.zip

Rants — No Comments
21
Mar 10

The ‘That’s Capitalism’ Argument

It seems that everyone has decided what capitalism is.

Capitalism, apparently, is the ability to let stuff fail. NAMA and, by extension, any other government support are not capitalism, because they deny the possibility of failure and replacement. This rhetorical line leads us directly to soak the rich-type propositions, carping about privatising gains, socialising losses, and aren’t bankers horrible people, etc, etc, etc (All of which might be true).

Lurking at the edges of an argument like this is an insider-outsider proposition that, really, those in government are bailing out their friends, using the systemic nature of the crisis as their excuse for doing so. Oddly, in invoking capitalism, the authors are just a hop and a skip from the kind of power-pyramid analysis a Marxian economist or social theorist would be quite comfortable with.

Continue reading →

UL — 1 Comment
3
Jan 10

Can you help me redesign stephenkinsella.net?

help wanted
Image by kandyjaxx via Flickr

Aim. I have 4.5 functions my site must be able to perform. Right now http://stephenkinsella.net does none of these particularly well, because web design isn’t my day job.

  1. Teaching Pages: Podcasts/Lecture Notes/Some stuff shouldn’t appear in the main pages, etc, but I don’t want to keep editing pages the whole time. I want a system where I write lecture notes, put up slides or links or vimeo videos *once*, and once only, and students can get at that content easily.
  2. Feedback: I need a way to generate student feedback per-lecture or per query. Comment boxes don’t seem to work well. I did this once 2 years ago, and it was a lot of work, see here.
  3. Op-Ed style ranting pages: (These should come to the front). I write an article once or twice a week for general audiences, see here. The current blog architecture does this really well, and list-category-posts does a passable job of archiving by topic.
  4. Research Pages: Now all a bit half-arsed, which is unfortunate, given that research is my day job. I want to connect a working paper to SSRN and/or MPRA, to showcase my work and get it indexed as soon as I put it up in this one space. I’d also like a way to manage different versions of the same article–now they just appear as newer blog posts, which is a pain in the arse.
  5. Sell my books: Right now, http://irelandin2050.com sucks, and there will be 3 more books by end 2010. I want to host them all in the same place, with different payment options, because there will be different publishers, and with the ability to host discussions/put up extra (gated) material/videos/podcasts/interviews/ in a similar space.

For colours, etc, think of sites that look like this: http://stephenkinsella.net, http://ignorethecode.net/blog/, http://zenhabits.net/. Think simple white space, well typeset text, few but significant images. Teaser images, etc, should work well by post, think http://ronanlyons.com on this.

I want to do this once. I’m happy to pay well and promptly for it, but to receive support if I need it for, say, 6 months.

I want you to show me that the work you’ll do is superior to something I can get for 80 bucks from these guys (http://diythemes.com/) and 5-10 hours of my own time. I expect a bit of help with SEO. I know enough .php/css/.html to cobble something together, but that’s not really what I’m after. Obviously, value for money is important.

Please drop me a mail if you’re interested in helping me sort this site out.

UL — No Comments
30
Aug 09

links for 2009-08-30

UL — No Comments
10
Aug 09

links for 2009-08-10

UL — No Comments
9
Aug 09

links for 2009-08-09

UL — No Comments
16
Jun 09

links for 2009-06-16

UL — No Comments
21
May 09

links for 2009-05-21

UL — No Comments
20
May 09

links for 2009-05-20

General — No Comments
20
May 09

The Kemmy Business School’s new BBS by Flexible Learning is on Twitter

How cool is this? Follow away.

BBS by Flexible Learning Open Evening in UL Tuesday 26th May 5.30pm-7.30pm in the Kemmy Business School

Twitter / KBS: BBS by Flexible Learning O …

General — No Comments
19
May 09

Paul Krugman is Reading Minsky

Hyman MinskyExpect the econo-blogosphere to go nuts tearing Minsky apart or trying to put him together, now that PK is on the case.

I’ve given some lectures on Minsky’s ideas as applied to the Irish case, but the best place to get the man’s ideas is in his magnum opus. Which I think is pretty well written, myself.

General — No Comments
18
May 09

Did you Know?

Limerick – Wolfram|Alpha

General — No Comments
18
May 09

Retour A La Normale…

The ESRI’s recent ‘Recovery Scenarios for Ireland’ offers us a glimpse of the ‘nirvana of the return to normal’ – a set of projections that could see the economy, if not flying high, then at least gliding well above ground level within a couple of years. It assumes that ‘if-only-we-can-get-through-this-spot-of-bother’ we can resume high levels of growth and relatively low (relative to today) levels of unemployment.

Notes On The Front

UL — 5 Comments
17
May 09

Ronan Lyons on Buying vs. Letting

Ronan asks a simple question with a pretty complicated answer.

…I had a look at average prices and rents for three-bedroom properties around the country from the start of 2006 on. I wanted to calculate the annual premium for owning your accommodation as opposed to just renting it, bearing in mind mortgage interest relief, prevailing interest rates and changing property values and rents. After all, economic theory would suggest that if you get to own the asset at the end of thirty years of living there, you should pay more than if you don’t.

The graph below shows the difference between renting and buying in annual terms for four regions – south County Dublin, Limerick, Dublin’s commuter counties and Connacht/Ulster outside of Galway. It’s calculated for a first-time buyer couple, with mortgage interest relief based on the first year of repayments. I’ve taken ECB+1% as the benchmark interest rate – something which of course may only hold for the first year.

Rants / UL — No Comments
6
Mar 09

Repaying loans is harder in a shrinking economy, here’s why:

The modern financial system is debt based. Since 1971, the financial system has had no tie to gold or any other physical standard. Through fractional reserve banking, money is created through the issuance of debt. The more debt that is issued, the more money there is, and the more demand there is for goods and services (if you believe the quantity theory of money).

As long as the system is growing, the system works well, because paying back debts with interest does not put too great a strain on the system. Want to see why? Look here.

When the economic system is growing, it is possible to pay back debt with interest, because even after paying interest, there is enough money left for other things.

For a business or government rolling over debt, cash flow continues to increase. When the economy hits limits, such as an oil supply that cannot grow fast enough to support the growth needed to keep the treadmill going, repaying the debt with interest becomes a huge burden. These graphs are from the Oil Drum, and they illustrate the point nicely.

The Irish economy is forecast to contract by 4-6% this year (i.e., GDP growth will be be negative), and we are in a deflation of at least 2-4% as well, so prices are falling, making the real value of our cash balances rise, but also making our borrowings that bit more expensive. This happened in another country, not too long ago. We live in interesting times.

Link to charts

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