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  Now food stamps are not actually called food stamps anymore. When I was a kid, they were called food stamps. It's basically a program the government has that provides money for individuals to buy food if they're low income. Essentially, we have in the US what's called the poverty line. And I'll talk a lot more about this at the end of the class, but  the poverty line is essentially a measure of what's a minimum level of resources you need to live in America.  The poverty line for an individual is about $14,000. OK, for a family of four, it's about $28,000. How you feel about that number obviously is going depend on where you're from. If you're from Boston, you'll say that's insane. If you're from some rural part of the country,  you think, yeah, that's poor, but manageable. OK, we'll talk later about the poverty line, what's good and bad about it. But, in any case, if you're below the poverty line in America, roughly speakin...

  Have you talked about the debate around the epilogue at all. And whether or not the epilogue is justified. And that question came up the other day. I think, (Nate) just ask talked about..  What are some things on your mind, you'd like to talk to (Michael) -about the epilogue  Sure, But the epilogue is very controversial in this book. There are lots of  people critics of Russian literature, who think that the epilogue is forced (is added on) and doesn't really belong with the novel. And that the Dostoyevsky's  intention is having  Raskolnikov go to Siberia  still believing  that his theory was  correct and not  repenting.  So the repentance is not  really shown fully  in the novel.  And that was the joke  at Cartoon from  the New Yorker. There could be a whole new third of the novel about Raskolnikov's repentance. But he doesn't repent until the very last minute. And some people think that repentance was ar...

  He (Newton) was able to calculate what the shape of the orbit should be if the law were the inverse square. And found indeed that it was an ellipse. So he got three for two, as it were. In addition, a number of  new phenomena had their obvious explanations. One was the tides. The tides were due to the pull of the moon on the earth. This had sometimes been thought of before, with the difficulty that  "If it was the pull of the moon on the earth, the earth being here, the water is being pulled up to the moon, then it would only be one tides a day where that bump of water is under the moon.  But actually, you know, there are tides every 12 hours roughly, and that's two tides a day."  But there was also another school of thought that had a different conclusion. Their theory was that it was the earth that was pulled by the moon away from the water. So actually Newton was the first one to realize what actually was going on, that the force of the moon on the earth an...

  So there's lots of reasons why I think well maybe this market doesn't work quite as well as economists say it does. People might be misinformed. P eople might be forced to do it.  What's interesting is the black market is not necessarily one of those reasons. And here's why.  Because the black market, economists just say, is a market.  Let's say eBay  doesn't allow you to sell your kidneys. So you have to go sell it on the black market. Well, if there's no other market failures, that's okay. for the same reason economists think it'd be okay to sell your body parts. There's no reason why sell your body parts on a form market, informal market. The only reason why it would be bad would if that informal market comes with other unsavory features like forcing people to sell their body parts or not being informed. That's when it would be bad. Okay.  What other reasons might we care?  Might be worried about people selling their kidneys.  Yeah.  W...

  We often assume that whatever happens inside us must be important. We say “Consciousness is important.” But in the history of life, consciousness may not be that important. Out of billions of species, only a few seem to have it. P erhaps it's not too extreme to call consciousness “evolutionary waste”, something that simply emerged along the way. "In fact", suffering exists because of consciousness. You can be injured, but if you're unconscious, you don't suffer. You can be in pain without necessarily suffering. If you are unconscious, your body may be injured and experiencing physical pain, but you are not consciously experiencing that pain as suffering. Someone gets injured in an accident. If they're unconscious, they don't suffer. It's the people watching who suffer. From a medical and biological perspective, suffering arises from consciousness. Of the billions of species on Earth, only five are currently known to be conscious humans,  chimpanzees,...

  Let's divide those letters in several groups. This one is the first group (A,K,M,O,T). It's not a word. Let's divide it with commas. It's just a group of letters that are familiar to the most people who know English, know French, Spanish, all those languages. The sounds are the same, (easy, right?). But it's still not enough to learn them effectively. You don't need to learn the isolated letters. It doesn't make sounds because what's the point in just seeing this letter and recognizing it inside the word. You need to learn them in words from the very beginning. So if you don't know what words to use, here I am to help you.  The most wonderful word for the most, let me do it here, for the most wonderful person. Then you certainly know this word. Can you read it? Out loud? Yourself, right?  Mama Of course means mom. Or should it be a capital letter, Mama. So immediately write this word from the very beginning. Don't write m separately. Don't ...

  Now, we come to the normative question which is more interesting and harder  "Should we be allowed to sell our bodily organs on eBay?"  Okay, you might think that this is a question you're in philosophy class but fundamentally it's an economics question. Okay, many folks die in America because the because we do not have enough organs to help those with organ failure. We we have a limited supply of organs. I hope you all are organ donors on your driver licenses. Doesn't cost you anything. You're gone anyway and it can save a life. Um but um many people don't do that. And even if they did, we're just we have a higher demand for organs than we can fit. Now if someone who wants an organ is wealthy and willing to pay a lot of money for it,  and there's someone else who says, "Look, I got two kidneys. You can function just fine with one. The odds of kidney failure is really low."  Someone says,  "Look, I am in desperate straits. I can...

  99.9% of our lives are driven by the emotional brain. The emotional brain here does not refer to being angry or happy. It concerns how we interpret our surroundings and react quickly. When we are weighing an activity and thinking about its pros and cons, that is called the rational brain. if you’re at the office at night  and have a lot of work to do, should you stay or go home? that's a rational decision. But once you go home, the decision is driven by emotion. For example, picking up the key, and put them them in the pocket, take the elevator (without thinking). Even walking in the parking lot — the whole process happens without thinking. Starting the car engine, turning left and right — don’t even have to (think), and suddenly you find yourself at home. Our brain has mapped them thousands of times, which make actions easy, are driven by the emotional brain. That is not a reflex, it’s the work of our emotional brain....

  So from this law, he would confirm the idea that the force is toward the sun and from knowing how the periods of the different planets vary with the distance away from the sun, it's possible to determine how that force must weaken at different distances and he was able to determine that the force must vary inversely as the square of the distance. Now so far, he hasn't said anything because he only said the two things which Kepler said, in different language. one is exactly equivalent to the statement that the force is forward the sun,  the other exactly equivalent to the statement that the law is inversely as a square of the distance But people had seen in telescopes that Jupiter's satelites are going around Jupiter. It looked like a little solar system. So the satelites were attracted to Jupiter. And the moon is attraceted to the earth and goes around the earth. It's attracted in the same way. So it looks like everything's attracted to everything  else. The next ...

  This model (Supply and Demand) raises a very important distinction that we're gonna focus on this semester. It's gonna trip you up. I guarantee you a number of times. So, I want you very careful thinking about this, which is the distinction between positive economics and normative economics. Positive economics study the way things are.  Normative economics is a study of the way things should be.  Now to consider to understand this let's consider a great example of economics at work which is eBay. When eBay came along, I know it is older than all of you, but it's younger than me.  When eBay came along, economists were very excited because economists love auctions. Auctions are, if you will, the standard market that used to exist in, you know, 15th century England. It's literally people bidding against each other in a way that reveals who wants the good the most. And what's wonderful about that, and we'll come back to this throughout the semester, is it ha...

This fact hints at an important law that governs our void,  The law of stability . Unstable blobs fall apart and vanish. Stable ones endure.   Now, watch what happens if we speed this up dramatically, maybe a couple of years per second, maybe even a couple million . You can see our blobs keep getting random jolts of energy, so they combine with others to form more complex compounds. Most attempts fail and fall apart, but every so often, by pure chance, you get a compound that is more stable than the blobs it's made of.   This doesn't happen because the blobs want to build more complex structures. It's just because these new configurations happen to be more favorable in the environment. And now when these complicated compounds become abundant enough, they too get a chance to combine, making our void increasingly complex. And one day, by accident, this causes an extremely unique shape to form, one with a special property.  See, the blobs it's made of just happen ...

  Can anyone tell me what that means ?  Your marginal rate of substitution (MRS) is 2.5 That is a meaningful concept.  Utils are not, but that is . Yeah, say it loudly so we can hear.  AUDIENCE:  You're willing to trade two pizzas for one cookie.  JONATHAN GRUBER:  Exactly, you're willing to give up 2.5 slices of pizza for one cookie. That's what that number means. And that is a meaningful number.  That's not an ordinal. That's cardinal.  We can use that.  You are willing to give up 2.5 slices of pizza to get one cookie.  What is the market asking you to give up?  How much pizza do you have to give up to get one cookie?  Half a slice.  You are happy to give up 2 and 1/2 slices of pizza to get a cookie, but the market is saying we'll let you have a cookie for half a slice of pizza .  So what should you do?  JONATHAN GRUBER: Eat less pizza. Eat more cookies . That will unambiguously make you happier. And that'...