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Erin Hamson

Modern History Sourcebook: Adam Smith: The Wealth of Nations, 1776 (Epitome) - 0 views

    • Erin Hamson
       
      The process of specialization was later perfected by Henry Ford, in making cheap, durable cars.
  • This great increase of the quantity of work which, in consequence of the division of labor, the same number of people are capable of performing, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labor, and enable one man to do the work of many....
  • Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favor, and show them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater art of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      This is the basis of the Market Economy or Capitalism, exchange based in self-interest that benefits all.
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  • In order to avoid the inconvenience of such situations, every prudent man in every period of society, after the first establishment of the division of labor, must naturally have endeavored to manage his affairs in such a manner as to have at all times by him, besides the peculiar produce of his own industry, a certain quantity of some one commodity or other, such as he imagined few people would be likely to refuse in exchange for their produce....It is in this manner that money has become in all civilized nations the universal instrument of commerce, by the intervention of which goods of all kinds are bought and sold, or exchanged for one another....
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The role/development of money. The problem with money is that it has to be regulated and who regulates it? If we let the governement regulate it, it might become manipulated...
  • The value of any commodity,
  • is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command
  • Labor, therefore, is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities....
  • The real price of everything
  • is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Note the difference between the value and the price. The price changes most significantly in relation to how much the consumer wants the product, as opposed to how much time it took the maker to make it.
  • which resolves itself into labor
  • resolves itself into rent
  • resolves itself into profit
  • ordinary or average rate both of wages and profit
  • partly by the general circumstances of the society,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      A man cannot charge above that which can be paid him or he will lose business.
  • partly by the particular nature of each employment
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Some labor is simply worth more
  • ordinary or average rate of rent
  • partly by the general circumstances of the society or neighborhood in which the land is situated,
  • partly by the natural or improved fertility of the land
  • When the price of any commodity is neither more nor less than what is sufficient to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labor, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing, and bringing it to market, according to their natural rates, the commodity is then sold for what may be called its natural price.
  • The actual price at which any commodity is commonly sold is called its market price
  • he market price of every particular commodity is regulated by the proportion between the quantity which is actually brought to market, and the demand of those who are willing to pay the natural price of the commodity, or the whole value of the rent, labor, and profit, which must be paid in order to bring it thither.
  • A competition will immediately begin among them, and the market price will rise more or less above the natural price, according as either the greatness of the deficiency, or the wealth and wanton luxury of the competitors, happen to animate more or less the eagerness of the competition.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The results of scarcity *footballs*
  • quantity brought to market exceeds the effectual demand
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Surplus
    • Erin Hamson
       
      ,effect of
  • A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      See above
  • When by an increase in the effectual demand, the market price of some particular commodity happens to rise a good deal above the natural price, those who employ their stocks in supplying that market are generally careful to conceal this change
    • Erin Hamson
       
      A monopoly
  • The exclusive privileges of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and all those laws which restrain, in particular employments, the competition to a smaller number than might otherwise go into them, have the same tendency, though in a less degree. They are a sort of enlarged monopolies,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      See above
  • THE produce of labor constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labor.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      You get what you make
  • Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labor.....
  • Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labor even below this rate
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Two combinations to react to one another. Like the checks and balances found in gov.
  • The demand for those who live by wages, therefore, necessarily increases with the increase of the revenue and stock of every country, and cannot possibly increase without it. The increase of revenue and stock is the increase of national wealth....
  • It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labor as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged
    • Erin Hamson
       
      equality in the pursuit of happiness
  • First, by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than would otherwise be disposed to enter into them; Second, by increasing it in others beyond what it naturally would be; and, Third, by obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock, both from employment to employment and from place to place.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Problems of Mercantilism
  • First,
  • by restraining the competition in some employments to a smaller number than might otherwise be disposed to enter into them
  • and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbor is a plain violation of this most sacred property.
  • An exclusive corporation necessarily weakens the force of this discipline.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      the gov is not needed for regulation
  • Second,
  • by increasing the competition in some employments beyond what it naturally would be
    • Erin Hamson
       
      pursuit of happiness
  • by obstructing the free circulation of labor and stock both from employment to employment, and from place to place,
  • Third,
  •  
    Thanks for the annotations and the comments.
anonymous

How Can I Help Students Retain More of What I Cover in Class? | Teaching and Learning E... - 0 views

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    This is a great article talking about how to improve learning retention rates
Erin Hamson

Keynes - 0 views

    • Rhett Ferrin
       
      Banks charge a higher interest rate for loans that are more risky. If you have bad credit that means you are more risky and therefore get a higher interest rate on your loan and vice versa.
Mike Lemon

Global Food Shortage; A Serious Threat? | Healthmad - 0 views

  • With the global population bursting at the seams, the scarcity of rich land to grow food, and more demanding diets, food supplies are diminishing at an alarming rate.
  • The global population, which currently stands at 6.8 billion, is expected to reach 9 billion within the next 40 years. This is a lot of mouths to feed, especially in areas where population growth will be the highest; mainly Africa and India, which are already facing not only food shortages, but severe water shortages as well.
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    When I read about the Economy of Abundance, I couldn't help but remember this article I read a few weeks back. I'll be posting more on this on my blog.
Madeline Rupard

Helium--An interesting idea. - 0 views

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    I stumbled upon this website the other day. Its an article site with a bunch of hired authors. "Wait--hired authors!!" You say, in righteous defense of the open "wiki" model. But the cool thing about hired authors is that they are all viewing and rating each other's articles. Hence, "helium," the best articles rise to the top. I mean who decided that it was the best system to have bored 40 year olds living with their parents as the main source of information. (Let's be honest, those wikipedia articles didn't write themselves.) The good thing about a paid workforce is that there is a sense of pressure under writing the articles. Their business model is in and of itself an "invisible hand." Anyways, i thought it was a cool idea. Voila.
Erin Hamson

MIT OpenCourseWare | Biology | 7.012 Introduction to Biology, Fall 2004 | Video Lecture... - 0 views

  • And what this means is that if you look at a pedigree like this, and for example, here we have a mother and a father, girls are always round, boys are square. And here you'll see the mitochondrial DNA, it's donated to all of the children, but the fact is that these boys, when they mate, when they have offspring, they will no longer pass along her mitochondrial DNA, so it will be lost. And the only way the mitochondrial DNA can be transmitted is through one of her daughters, who in turn, have daughters.
  • Here's some other interesting principles. Mitochondrial DNA passes always from the mother, so when a fertilized egg is formed, Dad gives his chromosomes, but he doesn't donate for any, doesn't donate any mitochondrial DNA.
  • animals are related to one another. This is kind of a fun undertaking. Look at this. Why is it fun? Well it's, it's kind of an amusing idea, how often were cows domesticated during the history of humanity? How often were sheep domesticated? Pigs, water buffalos, and horses. And what you see here is that cattle were domesticated on two occasions, probably once in Western Asia, the middle east, and once in Eastern Asia. Sheep were domesticated twice, all modern sheep following these two families here
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  • And that is, certain genes can evolve progressively over a long period of time, because they don't encode vital functions, or they may even be sequences between genes that don't encode phenotype at all. Imagine, for example, we have a situation were here we have a gene which encodes a vital function, like the eye, here's another gene that encodes another function, oh I don't know, a leg. And here we have intergenic sequences. After all, as you have learned by now, more than 96% of the DNA in our genome, doesn't encode proteins, and probably isn't even responsible for regulating genes. So these sequences, right in here, can mutate freely during the course of evolution, without having a deleterious effect on the phenotype of the organism. There's no evolutionary pressure to constrain the evolution of these genes
  • And many of these neutral mutations, which have no effect on organismic fitness, but are simply evolutionary neutral, are sometimes called polymorphisms. The term polymorphism, -morph is once again morphology, derives from the fact that species tend to be polymorphic, we don't all have blond hair, we don't all have brown eyes.
  • If you look at two chimpanzees living on opposite sides of the same hill in West Africa, they are genetically far more distantly related to one another, than any one of us, by a factor of 10 to 15. Two chimpanzees, they look exactly the same, they have the same peculiar habits, but they're genetically far more distantly-related than we are to one-another, than I am to any one of you, or than any one of you is to one another. And what does that mean? It means that, roughly speaking, the species of chimpanzees is, at least, 10 or 15 times older than our species are. We're a young species, chimpanzees probably first speciated three or four million years ago, if the paleontological record is, is accurate. Paleontology is the study of old, dusty bones, so you can begin to imagine when chimpanzee bones become recognizable in the earth.
  • And what you see already, in such small populations, is that for example, this male here has two girls, and right away, to the extent he had an interesting Y chromosome, that Y chromosome was lost from the gene pool. This girl, here, had an interesting mitochondrial DNA, but right away that's lost, because she has, she has just two boys. And what you see, in very rapid order, in small populations, there's a homogenization of the genetic compliment, just because the alleles are lost within what's called, genetic drif
  • And if you ask that question, the answer is that we all had a common ancestress who lived about 150,000 years ago. All of us trace our mitochondrial DNA to her. Does that mean that there was only one woman alive there, she's called, Mitochondrial-Eve, again, we don't know her name. Does that mean there was only one woman alive, well it doesn't mean that at all because of what I just told you, in small populations the proto-human population.
  • How much are all of our mitochondrial DNA are related to one another, how distantly related are they to one another, given the rate of evolution of mitochondrial DNA sequences?
  • So where do we all come from, all of us human beings? How closely related are we to one another? Here's, here's a measurement of the distances between different mitochondrial DNA's from different branches of humanity. And what you see is something really quite extraordinary and stunning. Here, you'll see that the people, the non-African lineages here and here, are actually relatively closely related to one another.
  • And by the way, all the genes that are present here, the alleles that are present here, can also be found in Africa, but in relatively small proportions in Africa
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Suggesting that all people came from Africa
  • So, what happens there, that's a testimonial to the tragic fate of the Indians, where the conquistadors from Spain came in, killed all the men, and took all the women, to be their brides. How else can you explain the fact that there's no Indian Y chromosomes, there's all, there is instead only European Y chromosomes.
  • When you do genetic counseling of family these days, one of the strictures is, that you never tell the family if the children have genetic polymorphisms that don't match that of the person whom they think is their father. They don't look like their, the person whom they regard as father, but that's always assumed to be a role of the genetic dice.
  • Here's a fun story I like to tell each year, and it's about the Cohen and Y chromosome, and you'll see what an amusing story this is, just from genetics. Now the name Cohen, in Hebrew means, a high priest, and you've heard people named Cohen, it's not such an uncommon name among the Jews. And it says, in the Bible, in Genesis and Exodus, that all the high priests in the Bible are the descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses.
  • hen it should be the case that all male Cohen's should have the same Y chromosome, right?
  • Because keep in mind, any single affair with the milkman or the mailman, over 3,000 years, would've broke this chain of inheritance, any single incidence of non-paternity. It's a really astounding story, and it's hard, there can be no artifact to it, there's no bias in it, there's no other way to explain it.
  • And what they found was that all members of the, almost all members of the ruling cast among the Lembas, had the same Y chromosome, and the Y chromosome had exactly the same polymorphisms of the Cohen Y chromosome
  • What I'm telling you is that these two genes are totally interchangeable, that they are effectively indistinguishable from one another, functionally they have some sequence relatedness, but in terms of the way they program development, they are effectively equivalent. And what this means is that the progenitor of these two genes must've already existed at the time that the flies and we diverged, which six or seven-hundred million years ago, and in the intervening six or seven-hundred million years, these genes have been totally unchanged.
  • once the gene was developed, evolution could not tinker with it, and begin to change it in different ways, ostensibly because such tinkering would render these genes dysfunctional, and thereby would inactivate them, thereby depriving the organism of a critical sensory organ.
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    An excellent discourse on who evolution works, and what it means for us today.
Shaun Frenza

Communist Manifesto (Chapter 1) - 1 views

  • holy alliance to exorcise
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Religious diction
  • All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Man is responsible for technology which is responsible for a fast paced world, which they don't like
  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Japan
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Seems a little singular - is there a specific reason why you only say "Japan"
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  • The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Capitalism has taken over the world, and those that were slow to buy into the idealology are being left in the dust, and dependant on others, which they don't like.
  • Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Communists retaliate by not producing enough goods.
  • He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Paints these people as the suffers, clearly appealing to them to call for "equality"
  • Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      In Communism all become slaves of the state and the state leaders, how is that better?
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Or they become the machine - They are not the slave, they are the mechanizm together... at least that is what they tell themselves.
  • All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Conflicts with the MIT lesson, except for those that have to work. (in regard to females working) again an appeal to the working class people, who are the masses to revolt. This works less well in America because of the American dream and the possibility for change fostered by it.
  • At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984, they hope lies in the masses of uncontrolled people
  • Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The working class fights back
  • so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat,
    • Erin Hamson
       
      they aren't alone in their cause
  • The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations;
    • Erin Hamson
       
      The shear fact of having money and therefore time to spend with children brings these differences.
  • The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.
  • Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable
    • Erin Hamson
       
      Doesn't believe capitalism can survive.
    • Rhett Ferrin
       
      Wait, all these sound like good things. Is he saying its bad to have Toyotas? Is it bad to have bannanas in December?
  • rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
    • Rhett Ferrin
       
      Can someone help me out here? Is he being sarcastic? He says capitalizm is bad then says that the bourgeoisie 'rescued' people from the 'idiocy of rural life' Thomas Jefferson thought the rural life was the ideal and to be sought after. I can't tell if Marx is for or against it.
  • By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour
  • By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.
  • immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation
    • Shaun Frenza
       
      Notice how we are in the same situation now as were were then - the facilitation of communication with the internet and how it shapes the world to become more homogenous.
Shuan Pai

Trickle-down Economics and Ronald Reagan - 0 views

  • no significant barrier to the accumulation of wealth by individuals
  • If the rich do well, benefits will "trickle down" to the rest.
  • To qualify as TDE a country must have either a low or flat rate tax on income or only a mildly progressive one (to insure that the rich can continue to get richer, or to trick the poor and middle income people into thinking they can get more and keep it).
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936 and its main thesis was that the federal budget need not always be balanced. Indeed Keynes proposed that the federal government should run a deficit, especially during a recession/depression.
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    describes the trickle-down economic system
Shuan Pai

Reaganomics, by William A. Niskanen: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of... - 0 views

  • Reaganomics" was the most serious attempt to change the course of U.S. economic policy of any administration since the New Deal.
  • These major policy changes, in turn, were expected to increase saving and investment, increase economic growth, balance the budget, restore healthy financial markets, and reduce inflation and interest rates.
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