David Ricardo's Blog

I think that a lot of the choices that I have had to make concerning college have revolved around minimizing income risk and mostly one other factor. This factor is what I want to do after I graduate. Since I was a junior in high school I have wanted to create a technique for human embryo genetic engineering. This basically allows for the rewriting of human genes before a person is born. This has limitless potential for lowering cancer rates, heritable diseases (Alzheimer's, huntingtins), disjunction diseases (trisomy 21, 19, 13 etc.) and hundreds of other diseases that are due merely to a change in a few base pairs of a 3 billion base pair genome. Because of this, I chose my majors as molecular and cell biology and economics, so that I could get both a basis for the science side and a small understanding of the business side. My other aim was to limit the costs of getting these degrees. While I had offers at 5 colleges, including two of the top ten ranked programs in molecular a

1) Looking at all of my old posts as a whole, I don't see many connections, apart from the obvious. Of course they all center around economic theories, specifically about organizations. One connection that really popped out at me though was efficiency. All of my posts address scenarios where groups are considered and factors are analyzed that show why a groups is more or less efficient or theoretical ways to make an organization more or less efficient. I think this is both interesting and encouraging, because it shows a very valuable real world application to each of the topics that we have discussed. As someone who wants to possibly own their own business in the future, I find this very encouraging. The second similar connection would be analysis from an upper management position. In many of these scenarios, we are looking from a bosses perspective at how best to manage a company or organization. Again, showing a real application for future management. As a side note, I found the

The example that comes to my mind when I think of the Illini bucks concept is parking. Personally, I have had an enormous amount of trouble with parking here at uiuc and I know I'm not the only one. In the scenario that I am thinking of, Illini bucks can be used to allow the buyer to buy preferential parking spaces (closer to their classes/apartment, off the street, covered or in a garage, etc.) It is important to note that the Illini bucks don't actually buy the parking spot, they just allow the buyer the ability to buy the spot. One change that would have to be made from the scenario that Professor Arvan outlined in the prompt would be that there would have to be other options for using Illini bucks other than for parking spaces, and the system for using the Illini bucks for parking spaces would have to be mediated by bidding. Without these two assumptions, everyone would just use all of their Illini bucks to buy the same level of access and the currency would be useless.