An hour-long presentation

MCI Worldcom and Sprint

Terrible!

I think I understand what Vesper feel, when holding tutorial. I entcountered the same situation today. If you can't read chinese, let me summarize his points,

1. not sure the audience understand or not, since no facial expression can be read.

2. unclear explanation.

3. unable to think quickly and response to questions raised.

To be a "preacher" is really not easy, to understand why others don't understand, invent an explanation that suit their way of thinking, and all these should be done in within seconds!

Suddenly, JC appears in my mind, but he leaves without a word. When can I meet him again?

Why that is a trapezium?

Some interesting thing left un-noted in the previous post, I better put it down when I still have a fresh memory now.

After I finished my illustration, and returned to my seat, the girl (with short jeans skirt) sit next to me, ask me a question about what I have just explained in board. Obviously, she did not want to ask me when I am still in front of the class. (So she prefers to do it privately instead of publicly. Is that implies something?) As you can refer to the post yesterday, I did monopoly model. To draw MR cut MC is easy, so the prof asked me to indicate the consumer surplus, producer surplus and deadweight loss. I have chosen a monotonically upward slopping MC curve, hope you know how the diagram looks like, if not, please refer to the textbook.

The question from her is, "why PS is a trapezium?"

Indeed I did explain that in my diagram, I have cut the DWL into half, and stated clearly the lower part belongs to Producer if there is perfect competition. The immediate thing I did, was not pointing back to the diagram I drew, instead I took up a pencil, and draw her a new graph with U shape MC. Can you guess what she asked then?

At this point, it should be clear that nothing implied, excerpt she is smart. If she really asked me that when I still stand next to the board and with a chalk in hand, do you know what will I do?

Two side of the same "course"

I live in the 'double world' as what Keynes described in his masterpiece. Law and Economics are the two I refer to, in the Selected topics in Price Theory. The course, although with the code as 'ECON3108', seems to be a law course entirely in the first three lectures. Today, I have the fourth one, my classmate ask me this after leaving the seminar room, "Are we entered a wrong room?"

A sudden, however small, change in environment (in Cheung's terminology, 'Constraint') usually cause discomfort (if there is a behavioural change, that is what comparative static should predict), not even to mention jumping into another world. The 'new' world is familiar to me --- I lived there for more than two years (that implies I left the real world for more than 730 days, although that also includes time spent on traveling between) --- which is the theoretical world in economics.

OK, no more analogy. Do you find the above paragraph difficult to read? That is what I feel when reading the Antitrust Statutes (The Sherman Act, The Clayton Act, The Federal Trade Commission Act). I made up this to let you have a taste of my first three lecture materials.

Enough. Without further ado, here comes the fourth one. We covered Monopoly pricing model, with uniform pricing, first and third degree price discrimination, and Cournot competition in 2 hours. These stuff should be easy to anyone who has taken Intermediate Micro [WC class], I suppose initially. Needless to say, the real situation is over half of the class appear to be never seen this before, they cannot answer most (simple) questions, not even to ask them come out to illustrate.

Illustration with chalk and blackboard in the seminar room is exciting, believe me. I do the part of Monopoly model with uniform pricing, my friend did the first degree P.D., and the rest was done by Dr. Chung. Could you imagine having a chance to speak and draw diagram in the seminar room, and answer questions raised by the audience? That is really wonderful, that is what I think university learning should be, that is the dream comes over and over again before I entered HKU. Now after two years, dream realizes.

Letter to Professor

The letter is about a small variation of the labour supply model,

"Dear Dr Chan,

I am writing to ask for clarification of an assumption introduced in the last class of Human Resources Economics.

In discussing the effect of the fixed time cost of working on the individual labour supply curve, you made the assumption that leisure is normal. What puzzle me is that the precise meaning of this assumption. I have tried to work out the reasoning in simple math, and discovered that the income elasticity of leisure is positive, as assume, but can never be greater than one, or the outcome is totally reversed. So what I want to ask is the assumption means, “Leisure is normal but not superior”.

I am not sure my calculation is correct, or am I thinking too much, or I have turned into a wrong direction. Anyway, please accept my apology for wasting your time if it turns out to be a silly question. Just to let you have an idea of who I am, still remember the one who answered, “It depends ……… but I don’t know it depends on what”, I am the one being asked about the leisure normal income effect.

Regards,

Cheng Ho Cheung
Becon, Year III "


The reply come as,

"Hi, what you said is correct. I should have stated that if both C and L are normal, then the hours of work will decrease. If the income elasticity of leisure is greater than 1, then hours of work will increase when there is a fixed time cost of working."


My letter is surely not as good as Vic's lengthy and detailed one about MRS and DMU. [You may find his work and some follow-up discussion here.] I choose not to include the working in the email, because the math is so simple, and I want intuition more than rigorous proof. It all start with an identity, T = L + H, then empolying some basic calculus to get the percentage change effect explicitly. The rest is just simple comparison, left hand side vs right hand side.

(Vesper has shown me the graphical solution this afternoon in the canteen, which is a bit confusing to put that here, as there are many curve moving, but the key is to consider also the vertical axis althought that is not the one representing the variable in question. It should be intersting to note that while we are discussing, there are some people talking econ stuff more seriously than we do over several table apart. I doubt if the prof. is receiving money, or he must have an illness that cannot stop teaching.)

I should be happy that I can use what learnt in MME correctly, and yet as a year 3 student in economics major, I can only ask a trivial question to fill in a small hole of the lecture material, should that be a sad thing?

Non-aversion to mental exercises

Today, I have IO. After class, I met someone who took MME with me last semester. The followings are what we say to kill time waiting the lift get down to ground floor.

"The lecture is so difficult, I would rather do a thousand matix algebra than work out the flow of this." (She is a Stat. Major.)

"Er...... But the model just presented is only an elementary monopoly model, you should have a taste of it in your micro analysis." (She minor econ.)

"You know how much the prof. covered last year, not even half of the topics listed in outline."

"Oops, thank god you have such a nice prof."

To me, it is surely harder to do a thousand matix algebra, but what make me feel ill about is her attitude. I am the type of person who will try whatever means to avoid mechanical stuff. I wonder if anyone would be happy to turn oneself into a computer-like machine. Reasoning, and creativity should be the most beautiful function of our mind. However, I met one think opposite today, no wonder WC put such line under prerequisites in the course outline, as what is used as the title of this post.

Antitrust

Antitrust is not about believing no one, althought no one worth. It is the law of stopping people to form agreement, which probably benefits the contracting parties, and most importantly, harm the outsiders at the same time. To me, it is just a common way to compete, a strategy with higher chance to win, so to speak in game theory term. I see no different between this and that people try very hard to bulid up human network, is that fair? Why don't compete with each other on our own? Perfect competition? Don't be silly, if I know the prof. well, I need not work that damn hard to prepare for my exam.

This semester I have taken the selected topics in Price Theory, the one being selected this time is Antitrust, in HK it will be called as law of fair competition. Lots of reading is distributed in the first lecture, most are the law stuff, hard to read, and there are some Latins in it.

However, the prof. said, "As a HKU student, you guys should know what this Latins means, luckily, I am from CU."

Anyway, it is fun to have a seminar type class of this, lots of discussion, everyone participate (althought only 6 students enrolled), indeed it is the atmosphere that I think the university learning should look like, before I enter HKU.

The first day without JC and Vesper

It has been a long time, a long long time haven't updated this blog. The reason isn't particularly special, just lazy, or there is nothing worth to blog.

Today is the first day, the first day in HKU that I can't find any familiar senior in Economics. That means a new starting, yet not such an enjoyable one.

As usual, WC is very nice. He try to explain the course outline in the most clear way, and warn those who take it as a management course --- get the hell out of here! And he emphasize intuition is very important several time. Finally, he make the prediciton that many will leave after the add/drop period, and the tutor is of no use, strictly speaking, no tutor is needed.

CYT, as often, read out the outline in a way that make you felt asleep, combined with his "cool" joke.

The new professor is really serious, to the extent that I feel my determination isn't enough to overcome. Before teaching anything, the first homework is distributed. My immediate response is, "what a good way to drive out the excess people." My checking of the web later refute my conjecture, the second homework is already posted.