Four finals later and I've wrapped up obligatory academic actives for the semester. Thank goodness! I only hope intermediate microeconomics makes use of some delicious multivariable calculus goodness. Otherwise I will spend another semester complaining about America's dysfunctional relationship with the glorious field of Mathematics.

But enough about me. Apparently the global economic downturn has given Russians reason to be more pessimistic than usual. According to Bloomberg, Russian consumers have so little faith in the ruble they're liquidating bank deposits to purchase foreign currency or real, tangible assets, like gold, silver and real estate. I suppose, given the current economic situation this is nothing unusual. People often hoard precious metals to hedge against economic uncertainty.

Russian consumers, however, have also begun using their newly liquid bank deposits to purchase consumer goods, like an extra flat-screen television set or a third refrigerator. This has some interesting implications. Unlike a gold bar or a diamond, consumer goods are an awful store of value. Even adjusted for inflation, an ounce of gold is worth far more today than it was worth 100 years ago. The same can be said for a diamond. On the other hand, consumer goods almost always depreciate in value over time. A high-end television from the 1990s would be worth a fraction of its original value today, both in real and nominal terms.

That Russian consumers consider a television or microwave a better store of value than their own currency implies that, on the whole, Russian consumers expect their currency to depreciate more quickly than consumer goods. Think what that means! Russians expect the ruble to depreciate more quickly than my laptop computer — purchased September 2006 — which now sells on eBay for less than half of its original purchase price. It would be equivalent to the dollar, currently trading at about .75 dollars per euro, falling by half against the euro to .375 dollars per euro in the next two years. At that rate, an Hermès Birkin bag, currently starting at around $7,500, would cost an American over $15,000 by 2010. A seven quart Le Creuset French Oven, now about $260, would run some $520. Or maybe Russian consumers still haven't shaken off 70 years of socialism.

Perhaps I should short some rubles.

Image courtesy of chotda via flickr

Finals week is almost upon me and the rest of my fellow students. In recognition of this fact, our dining services folks have put together a special menu for part of next week to cater to students' desire for comfort food. But I must say, I don't find any of their comfort food very comforting.

Generally, our dining services folks do a reasonably good job of providing reasonably good food. It's not Per Se by any stretch of the imagination, of course. They still haven't served up so much as a loaf freshly baked bread, and most of their attempts at ethnic food do nothing but befuddle my taste buds. Nevertheless, I would argue our dining Commons offers fare considerably better than the food I've tried at other schools.

Here, however, I have to wonder what the director of dining services was thinking. Next Wednesday, for instance, Commons will have a make-your-own burger and quesadilla bar. While I don't object to burgers or quesadillas in general, I have never thought of either plate as "comfort food." I think of them more as convenience food, invented, or at least popularized, by fast food eateries for busy Americans on the go. Precisely the kind of food that has led this nation to become the world's most obese. It's also food I generally equate with stress, not relaxation.

The menu also troubles me because it seems a direct contradiction to the whole "Bates Contemplates Food" initiative that has influenced events on campus all year, following the donation of $2.5 million to the College for the express purpose of improving nutrition. I feel like we should have more arugula and pan-seared halibut, and fewer hot dogs and chicken "nuggets."

So, what would I serve for dinner during finals week? In the event someone with the power to influence dining decisions reads this, I would love a nice French pot roast, braised in the oven for several hours in red wine with aromatic vegetables and a blend of Provençal herbs and spices.

For whatever reason, I decided to start using Facebook in French. While I'm not a native French speaker, I at least like to believe that I know enough about the language to spot glaring grammatical problems.

At any rate, I noticed that the whizzes at Facebook have yet to write the code to adjust adjectives to the proper form, masculine or feminine. Take, for example, a person tagged in a photo. If the person tagged is male, then the notification should read, "Robert a été marqué dans un album." On the other hand, if the person tagged is female, then the notification should read, "Marie a été marquée dans un album." (Note the extra e at the end of "marquée.") Instead, Facebook just splits the difference and pretends it knows nothing about the gender of the person in the photo: "Albert a été marqué(e) dans un album."

Facebook's approach is not incorrect per se. The whole parenthetical e maneuver is commonly used in situations where the gender of the person mentioned is unknown, such as on a signup form on a website. But, given the huge amount of information users willingly give to Facebook, I feel like they should (and can afford to) pay someone to leverage the gender information each user provides to remove the parenthetical e!

I hadn't realized that Venice was flooded. But apparently it is, according to The New York Times. I particularly loved this paragraph from the Times article:

Work began on the $5.5 billion project five years ago and is expected to be completed around 2011. Had the dam system been in place, "it would have prevented what happened yesterday and also today," said Flavia Faccioli, a spokeswoman for the state consortium that is building the dams.

This is just more evidence that rich countries probably won't have too hard a time coping with most of the effects of global warming. Even if sea levels rise by ten feet, I doubt whether the US Government or the City of New York would hesitate to build some elaborate system to keep Manhattan dry. I also see this as more evidence that the real economic problem posed to the developed world by global warming is the influx of refugees from countries that can't afford the same kinds of sophisticated systems.

Two weeks ago I sat the second of two semester exams in my introductory microeconomics course. (That the economics department here would not exempt me from EC 101 is another story.) This morning, the grades for that second semester exam went online. As much as I discount grades for their imperfect ability to gauge performance, I did happen to take a look, expecting that the grade would be at or around what I had predicted.

To my great horror, I received but 76 of the 90 possible points on the exam. (That's about 84%, or a B.) In and of itself, that number is not terribly terrifying; worrying, yes, but nothing life threatening. No, I find this number particularly irksome because I have a strong feeling that at least 14 of the 14 points my professor deprived me have everything to do with the bizarre pseudo-math my intro economics class employs. In other words, Bates College's woefully inadequate math requirements for economics courses have the perverse side effect of deflating my grade.

I can understand that not everyone has the opportunity to take calculus in high school. But I can't understand why it's so unreasonable to require anyone taking any kind of economics course to be, at the minimum, concurrently enrolled in a calculus course. In my annoyance with the current economics curriculum, I popped over to MIT OpenCourseWare and took a look at their introductory microeconomics course. I doubt a student could receive anything better than a C on the first problem set without at least a basic understanding of single variable differential calculus.

Some people I have raised this point with argue that, if I'm as smart as I claim to be, using simplified formulas to do numerical analysis in economics should be easy, and thus have a positive effect on my grade. After all, isn't simple addition, multiplication and division easier than differentiating functions?

I can't argue with the fact that it's easier to compute the marginal cost using a formula that takes the sum of two values and divides it by another. While I would scarcely call taking the derivative of a function and plugging in a value difficult, it is at least relatively easier than the previous method.

On the other hand, not using calculus requires me to fundamentally change the way I think about problems. Take the method I must use to calculate marginal cost. Rather than receive a nice differentiable total cost function, I am generally provided a total cost table with a few quantities and their corresponding levels of total cost to the firm. Something that looks like this:

Now, given this table, to find the "correct" marginal cost at 2 units of output, I would take the difference in total cost between 1 unit and 2 units of output and divide that by the difference in production:

(404-401) / (2-1) = 3

To find the marginal cost using the magic of mathematics, I would take my improvised total cost function, differentiate and find the value of the differentiated function at 2 units:

TC(Q) = Q²+400
TC'(Q) = MC(Q) = 2Q
MC(2) = 4

(I realize that this total cost function does not satisfy some important first- and second-order conditions that a total cost function should. I just don't feel like spending the time to cook up a perfect function for the sake of illustrating this point.)

Note that the two methods produce different answers! This is due to the fact that the first "correct" method is essentially just an extremely crude approximation of the second value discovered with basic tools of mathematical analysis. And it's not the only approximation I could use either. The derivative at 2 could also be approximated using (0, 400) and (2, 404), or any number of other points around the one I want the derivative at. Which begs the question: why bother teaching people a method that's only trivially easier, but which introduces such huge differences in understanding and such a huge error in calculation?

Perhaps fittingly, economists generally define irrational behavior as behavior in which an actor makes a systematic error in his or her thinking.

In my desperation, I have considered using B-splines to construct differentiable functions through the points provided in one table or another to free myself from the confines of basic arithmetic. (Apparently even linear functions are too complicated for my microeconomics class!) The only problem with that, of course, is that any answers I find using that method will probably not be equal to the numbers someone would find using the prescribed methods.

I can only hope that intermediate microeconomics, which I've signed up to take next semester, employs some real numerical analysis. That, and I really hope that my potentially bad grade in microeconomics doesn't send to bad a signal to future employers and graduate programs.

No store hesitates to send me their mass emails promoting the latest caveat-ridden offer for free shipping. But occasionally, out of boredom or frustration with bézier curve drawing in Scheme, I click on their lures to buy more products I probably (or definitely) don't need. (With all the data these websites collect about me, would it be so difficult to figure out that I probably won't want to buy a plaid skirt, even at 40% off?)

Anyway, a few minutes ago I clicked on the latest email from Saks.com touting their designer sale. There were a few items I might have purchased on a whim, simply because they really were pretty good deals. But on each of the seven items I almost added to my shopping cart, I was confronted by the fact that the site only had sizes XL and XXL available.

I've written about this before. I think I called it second hand obesity. But the frequency with which I encounter this problem — regardless of whether or not a particular item is on sale — leads me to think that perhaps other forces are at work.

I have two new hypotheses. Perhaps the buyers for department stores are just bad economists. In other words, they have yet to realize, after several years of obvious signals from consumers, that not everyone wants to buy raincoats the size of a small tent. Admittedly, that theory strikes me as dubious.

Alternately, perhaps high-end department stores purposely buy large sizes in excess to make their customers feel better about themselves. It seems at least plausible to imagine that people will feel better looking at a rack of clothes knowing that, even if they take an "L" shirt off the rack, that some other more unfortunate soul will have to ashamedly take the "XXL" number right beside it. Or, to rephrase, people feel better about themselves knowing there's someone even more overweight out in the world. After all, there's quite a bit of evidence to suggest, at least when it comes to income, people's happiness is tied more to relative income, not absolute income. Even if the stores only manage to have consumers take the excess crazy huge clothes off their hands at steep discounts, the improved "atmosphere" of their stores might lead to a net benefit to the bottom line.