David Ricardo's Blog

The most successful team that I have been on in the past would be my pollinating crew at Pioneer. I worked pollinating as a summer job because it paid very well and it looked better on a resume than babysitting. There were three incredibly simple tasks. The first was chute bagging. At the beginning of every season, the highest chute on the corn plant had to be covered with a small plastic bag so that it didn't absorb any pollen that we didn't want it to. The second was just called bagging. For this one, we covered the pollen tassels at the top of the corn plant once they had started to shed. The last was called crossing. For this one we took the tassel bag from one corn plant, removed the chute bag from another (or the same one) and stapled the tassel bag over the chute, so that only the desired pollen was used to fertilize that one corn plant. The only possible complexity was the pattern of which tassel bag was used to pollinate which chute. Sometimes we would perform cross po

I have always found opportunism an interesting moral area. Often it is portrayed as evil or comedic in movies, for example when a main character needs information and is held up for exorbitant sums of money in exchange. These hold up scenarios are complex because from an economic standpoint, there is nothing wrong with them. The main character is leaving with a small amount of surplus even after parting with so much money (or else he wouldn't have paid that much) and the supplier of the information is gaining a large surplus from the basically "free" cash. Now from an economics viewpoint, this could also be considered a monopoly or gouging depending on the situation, both of which are illegal in the United States. And this is where the morality comes in. While economics finds that both gouging and monopolies can be the optimal market outcome in some situations, morally, we know that isn't usually the case. The same goes for these opportunistic exchanges. Like in a m

I am not currently involved in any RSO's so my best example of participation in an organization would be my summer job of the past three years, which is teaching swim lessons. I teach children between six months and fifth grade at Sholem pool (a public Champaign pool) each summer. Some background information that will be important for these examples is that the summer is cut up into two week sessions. Within these sessions the children are placed into classes based on a variety of swimming skills, not by age. After each session, the children have the ability to move up or down in class level at the instructor's discretion. For our purposes we can consider the organization as run by two coordinators, one who oversees the general swim lessons, we will call her B, and one who oversees the organization of private swim lessons, we will call her R. One perfect example of transaction costs occurred for me two summers ago while working. After a particularly successful class session,

David Ricardo was born on April 18th, 1772 in London and died on September 11th, 1823. David was the third child in a jewish family that had immigrated from the Netherlands. His father was a successful stock broker who had made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange. At 14 David began to follow in his father's footsteps, but by 21 they had split due to religious differences. David still did well for himself by making a small fortune, which allowed him time to study his interests such in literature and science. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ricardo At 27, David began to take an interest in economics after reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations . This prompted him to write his first economic article on the bullion controversy. At the time, the banks of London weren't backed by gold and so were generating bills and loaning at an exaggerated rate. The country was deeply divided at the time over whether this was causing the inflation that the country was seeing, o

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