There has got to be a better way of studying economics than poking at fixed-point theorems.

I got on the bus and headed for the seat near the exit.

Next to me was an old Chinese man, face lined and looking rather sunburned, apparently napping. A folded lianhe zaobao sat in his lap.

My sitting down must have roused him, because he obliged by putting his newspaper away, fishing in his pockets for a new moments, then taking out a hot pink iPod shuffle and white Apple earphones, fitting them carefully to his ears. Then he grinned towards the window, head nodding gently in time to some unknown music.

Someone just called me.

"Hey, are you coming?"

... what?

"Wait, is this David?"

Uh, yes. Who-

*cut*

...





This is my confused face!

I fled to economics because I realised my ability to grasp abstract physical principles was limited; since then I've realised that economics is just even more complicated.

It's fun, though!

The story of Benoit Mandelbrot's fractal geometry is fascinating in light of the inescapable logic of physics envy. Although Mandelbrot's study of fractals grew out of his work in economics, economists showed no interest in his theories of techniques until they had been deployed by physicists. As one eminent economist explained to him: "No mathematical technique ever becomes prominent in orthodox [read, neoclassical] economic theory without having first proved itself in physics." (Cited in Mirowski 1989,387).

- JB Murphy, The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered, ed. J Friedman

The key idea at the base of microeconomics is exchange: we don't know, objectively, the value of a given product. We therefore say - if two people trade freely, then their preferences have been revealed by their trade. Thence value! And this is, itself, a valuable insight.

This idea works wonderfully in exchange economies, but it does not extend well towards actual economies with production and labor and geography and so on. If people were exactly, perfectly rational with perfect access to to information, this distinction would vanish (and I should be able to predict the future!). But this isn't so, and it isn't clear how to weaken such conditions - in effect, the model is incredibly strong in isolated areas, but weak in the other ideas that we are interested in.

This is especially frustrating given that there appear to be some kinds of quasi-causal relationships out there - demand curves generally slope downwards, don't they? We just don't know how they work, precisely, and an approximate answer isn't enough.

There is no dichotomy between "markets are rational" and "voters are rational"; it seems entirely coherent to say that both occasionally fail - perhaps markets mess up in a certain manner; we should thereby attempt to compensate via voters in another manner. This merely means that economics is complicated.

Optimality is a convenient abstract device, but it is perhaps overrated.

Toefl: 114/120. Not that I expected anything less than very good, it's Test of English as a Foreign Language, after all. So it's largely a formality.

So, University of Warwick for me.

Incidentally, here's me a year and three-quarters ago. Curiously, I feel much more optimistic now.

People keep asking me what I'm doing with my time.

( Cut for large images )

All in all, the height of productivity. mirite

Afghanistan has exactly one known pig. Not one species of pig: one pig.

It's under quarantine now, of course.

There's a little road behind MGS, near Bukit Timah. Old Holland Road: if you walk along it it winds its way across a little river valley and eventually connects to Holland Road. Which is why the Holland Road which now connects Queensway to Clementi suddenly becomes Ulu Pandan near Clementi: a little relic of history and road planning.

Back in the 90s there was going to be a condominium built there, and a stretch of jungle was cleared and the valley smoothed in. Then the 1997 crisis hit and ever since the area has just been left idle, steadily growing grass. Satellite imagery on Google gives a rough idea of what it looked like a few years ago; now it's more green and less brown. Occasionally there are parties held by residents of the nearby houses: once I saw some children playing with giant inflatable hamster balls, climbing in and attempting to roll down the valley - it wasn't quite steep enough to gather momentum, halfway down the ball would roll to a halt and its occupants would clamber out, yelling.

It's a wonderful place to walk through at night, preferably at some unearthly hour of the morning. The valley all around descends into darkness, and in the distance CBD towers twinkle away: the quirks of terrain and history have arranged that there be no hills or tall neighbourhoods to block the view.

It's very annoying having your confidence in whatever you believe consistently shuttle between nil and total every day, often in less than an hour, based merely on what you happen to be reading at the moment.

There's a tiny, tiny kitten in my house back lane! It was meowing for about an hour continuously, but now it looks like it's gone to sleep. I can't go out without unlocking an amazing amount of door locks (very noisy and audible at 4am) but it looks alarmingly small through the window.

My family is usually away from the house. Cat seem to like that state of affairs - it's the second noisy kitten in three months. I keep seeing adult cats near the house during the day, too.

I'm not sure what about the back lane makes it attractive to rear kittens in, though - it has no shelter from the rain and is surrounded by walls at least four feet high on three sides. Adult cats can leap out into the neighbour's back lane, but a kitten can hardly do so.

I'm quite amused by all the advertisements going "we're beating the recession by cutting prices!!" or somesuch. It's a recession, what else were we supposed to expect?

We expect large companies to behave in many ways like governments - subject to popular pressure, self-limiting despite enormous theoretical power.

A bank sells a mortgage to an individual who can't pay. We blame the bank: after all, it is much much larger than the individual, and presumably much smarter...

From Welfare Economics, Ng Yew-Kwang:

"The Yang-Ng framework of inframarginal analysis was used by Ng and Ng..."

"Ng and Ng also discovered that..."

"Chu (1997), Wen (1997), and Wen and King (forthcoming) used the Yang-Ng framework to..."

Technically it doesn't actually matter, since I can just fish through the bibliography to see who the other Ng is, but it gets really darned distracting after a while.

And pretty soon we're going to have even more and more Tans and Lius and Chens and the inevitable citations to papers by Chen, Chen and Chen are just going to get messed up.

I have seen Terminal Two in pictures or in person at least twenty times over the past week.

:)

View from my window:

The knowledge that a given song is a hit, or that a friend likes a given song, can substantially modify my own appreciation of that song.

Clearly, I am a very superficial person...

There are pigeons on the staircase just outside my door!

They are noisy.

In politics and philosophy essays, the best answer to every question is "no".

Being contrary gives you more to talk about.