INTERVIEW

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My age is____84_______________

My gender is: (circle one)                                                   

Male                                          Female X                                                      

Please make a mark in the box indicating your agreement with the following statements Mark “not applicable” if you cannot answer the question given your experience with the course so far.	strongly disagree	disagree	neutral	agree	strongly agree	Not applicable
The government should regulate the economy		x
Politics has a major influence on the economy					x
Everyone should take an economics class in high school				x
The drinking age should be lowered to 18		x
The government bailouts worked		x
The United States should have a higher minimum wage					x
In 6 months the economy will be better than today		x
I am well informed about economic news				x
The recession personally affected me				x

Ask everyone the following 8 questions:

1.     In your lifetime, what city that you are familiar with has changed the most (both positive and negative)? NYC. Positively because it is still the most attractive city in the country but negatively because its to populated

2.     In your opinion, what president had the biggest positive impact on the economy? Why? Bill Clinton because he made it possible for people to get jobs and the economy picked up when he was running.

3.     What is your first memory of a major economic event impacting your life? What economic event in your lifetime had the biggest impact on you? The first depression was the first memory impacting her life because it affected her family. The economic event that had the biggest impact on her was when Bush came into office because the economy went way down because it was heard for people to make a good living.

4.     What tradeoffs in your life have you made due to economics (note to interviewer/student: this question is about the concept of scarcity)? Gas prices went up because it made it hard to plan trips

5.     How do you get economic news? How has this changed over your life? She got economic news by the TV and the newspaper. When the news would break out people would be running down the street yelling “EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT”. They would do this when a huge crisis happened. When my grandmother was 13 was when the Vietnam surrendered and people got the news from the men walking down the street.

6.     How do you deal will rising prices e.g. substitute cheaper brand, stop buying? Any examples? Just do with less, buy less food, less clothes, especially id your son a fixed income.

7.     What product or service has most changed over your lifetime? Food has changed because growing up there wasn’t as much. They didn’t have many meats or vegetables either

8.     How do you handle saving and how has this changed. You don’t save. Its hard to save when your on a fixed income. Still have to pay bills

Choose 2 of the following questions (or create your own):

1.     What product or service has had the biggest price change in your life?

2.     What was your personal best year? How was the country doing?

3.     What age were you when you got your first credit card? Didn’t own a credit card until she was married for a long time.

4.     What was the price of gas when you got your first car? $0.17

5.     How much does the stock market affect your life?

6.     What was your wage at your first job?

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My age is_____57______________

My gender is: (circle one)                                                   

Male X                                         Female                                                      

Please make a mark in the box indicating your agreement with the following statements Mark “not applicable” if you cannot answer the question given your experience with the course so far.	strongly disagree	disagree	neutral	agree	strongly agree	Not applicable
The government should regulate the economy				x
Politics has a major influence on the economy				x
Everyone should take an economics class in high school				x
The drinking age should be lowered to 18				x
The government bailouts worked			x
The United States should have a higher minimum wage			x
In 6 months the economy will be better than today		x
I am well informed about economic news				x
The recession personally affected me				x

Ask everyone the following 8 questions:

1.     In your lifetime, what city that you are familiar with has changed the most (both positive and negative)? LA because they have gone broke and there is no positive change.

2.     In your opinion, what president had the biggest positive impact on the economy? Why? Bill Clinton because he was able to see both sides the democrats and republicans and some to a middle

3.     What is your first memory of a major economic event impacting your life? What economic event in your lifetime had the biggest impact on you? The Vietnam War. The recession had the biggest impact of him was because people had less money to spend

4.     What tradeoffs in your life have you made due to economics (note to interviewer/student: this question is about the concept of scarcity)? You then shop more frugally so you could save more money.

5.     How do you get economic news? How has this changed over your life? The Internet because the news used to just be the newspaper and the radio and now its instant.

6.     How do you deal will rising prices e.g. substitute cheaper brand, stop buying? Any examples? Shop for better deals, shop in bulk and look for the sales.

7.     What product or service has most changed over your lifetime? Water because its increased in price a lot.

8.     How do you handle saving and how has this changed. Your more cautious on where you put your money because of the stock market crash.

Choose 2 of the following questions (or create your own):

1.     What product or service has had the biggest price change in your life?

2.     What was your personal best year? How was the country doing?

3.     What age were you when you got your first credit card? 27

4.     What was the price of gas when you got your first car? $0.62

5.     How much does the stock market affect your life?

6.     What was your wage at your first job?

  -->

My age is_____20______________

My gender is: (circle one)                                                   

Male                                          Female   X                                                   

Please make a mark in the box indicating your agreement with the following statements Mark “not applicable” if you cannot answer the question given your experience with the course so far.	strongly disagree	disagree	neutral	agree	strongly agree	Not applicable
The government should regulate the economy				x
Politics has a major influence on the economy				x
Everyone should take an economics class in high school				x
The drinking age should be lowered to 18					x
The government bailouts worked			x
The United States should have a higher minimum wage					x
In 6 months the economy will be better than today		x
I am well informed about economic news		x
The recession personally affected me		x

Ask everyone the following 8 questions:

1.     In your lifetime, what city that you are familiar with has changed the most (both positive and negative)? Boston Harbor because it used to be very dirty and people are adding restaurants now and making is very nice but the change is negative because now small business that have been there for a very long time are being pushed out by new developments.

2.     In your opinion, what president had the biggest positive impact on the economy? Why? President Obama because he was the first black President in a long time.

3.     What is your first memory of a major economic event impacting your life? What economic event in your lifetime had the biggest impact on you? My first memory of an economic event was the recession and it had a big effect on my life because ever since then its been hard to get a job.

4.     What tradeoffs in your life have you made due to economics (note to interviewer/student: this question is about the concept of scarcity)? The trade off I made was when the gas prices went up I started to not drive as much or take the train if I were to travel long distances.

5.     How do you get economic news? How has this changed over your life? I get my news from the TV and the Internet.

6.     How do you deal will rising prices e.g. substitute cheaper brand, stop buying? Any examples? Coupons help me wit rising prices for example buying generic brands instead of the name brands.

7.     What product or service has most changed over your lifetime? Vehicles and how they can run on alternative fuel sources.

8.     How do you handle saving and how has this changed. I put away 1 dollar for every 10 dollars

Choose 2 of the following questions (or create your own):

1.     What product or service has had the biggest price change in your life?

2.     What was your personal best year? How was the country doing?

3.     What age were you when you got your first credit card? 18

4.     What was the price of gas when you got your first car? $2.84

Lettuce

Price Of Lettuce

     Every month a new consumer price index (CPI) comes out and tells us whether prices have gone up or down and whether we are going through inflation or deflation. The CPI controls everything from social security, school lunches, to bonds, everything is affected by the CPI. One question I had that i found the answer to from listening to the podcast was where did this number come from? I found out that there are 450 people that collect the CPI number and those people call themselves economic assistance's. Basically their job is to walk into a store and look at the price of things and compare the price of the item to what the price of it was last month. 

     George Minichiello who works with the consumer price index is a guy who goes into stores and sees whether the price of certain products have gone up or stayed the same or have decreased. I thought that this job was actually kind of cool because you have to be very discrete about the job and cant tell anyone what you do. George was a very unassuming guy and didn't drive a fancy car and couldn't say much about what he did. The first stop that they went to was a grocery store which George has been going to once a month for three years. They were at the grocery store to find out the price of lettuce which had to be a specific lettuce. They had to look for a bag of romaine hearts of lettuce which was priced at $2.99. The price of the lettuce stayed the same but the weight of the lettuce has changed. What they saw here with the lettuce was a little bit of deflation and there was a 27% mass drop. But with food its different and you see lots of fluctuation in price.

     There are two types of CPI there is the headline CPI which includes basically everything and then there is the core CPI which includes food, oil and that number is usually the stable number. The next stop they went to happened to be the core CPI. They had went to a clothing store and needed to find a collared shirt for a young boy. George said it was a lot harder to price ladies clothes because there are more things that we have to look for when pricing everything. The CPI needs to know what Americans are paying for what they are buying and what they are buying. The price of the shirt was $25.00 which was the same price as last months. After listening to this podcast it really made me think about how many people are out there looking for CPI numbers and we don't even know it.

GDP

In the first video i learned a lot. I learned that the economy is either growing or shrinking all the time and with every penny we spend its all gets rolled up into GDP. For example like cars, toothpaste, cereal all gets added into GDP. But anything that is imported into the US like from china for instance is taken out of GDP. I never knew that manufacturing is 12% of GDP and Health Care is the most expensive its 16% of GDP. If you were to buy an old building to live in that wouldn't count towards GDP but a new building being built would. The government would actually try and guess by a lot of data about market information how much it would cost if you actually rented out that old building that you live in. So from that i found out that 1.9 trillion got added to GDP for just housing. The GDP for 2010 was 14.5 trillion which was the biggest GDP. Basically you need a GDP to keep growing which is the most important thing about it. When i listened to Why GDP is like GPA, i learned that GDP is not always a perfect number because of everything that if being manufactured and bought changes it all the time. What really surprised me and raised a question that i thought of was how if you buy a tomato that goes towards GDP but if you were to grow it it does not go towards GDP same with if you hired a nanny to watch your kids that goes towards GDP but if you watched your kids by yours self that would not goes towards GDP. So why would we buy things and give the government our money when we could save more and do things ourselves? Also with the oil spill all the helpers that helped clean the oil spill is calculated into GDP but nothing was subtracted from the environmental issues themselves. What also surprised me was that by preventing air pollution the GDP could be 2% lower than it is now. We spend 17% of GDP on healthcare which is a lot compared to Europe. In Europe its less than 10% and also the US spends more than 4.0% of GDP on military which is major also while Europe is less than 1.0%. All three things about GDP gave me things to think about and definitely stirred up questions.

Would you let a coin toss decied your future?

Flipping a coin is easy for the little things like where to go out to eat or what movie to go see but we wouldn't flip a coin on a big decision like a big move into another house or a new profession. Would you or wouldn't you. Daniel Herrington 26, who now works on advanced research projects for energy was a former professional race car driver about 2 years ago. He wants to know if he should leave his job now and hes pretty indecisive so Daniel went with the coin toss. Daniel and his girlfriend decieded that since they are both very indecisive and the coin toss make their life so much easier.

Steve Levitt said that most of the stories are factual based stories and there not meant to help people. Steve says that the upside of quitting even though quitting has a bad wrap, strategic quitting though can be a good thing. We make choice without a lot of information and then we get new information and quitting might be the right thing to do Steve says. Steve has quit everything that he is bad at.

Serra Mentessi says that she fell outta love with running but thought it was very hard to quit because it defined her. Serra needed someone to tell her that it was okay for her to quit running and when she heard the podcast she was able to do so. When people are faced with a big decision, should they quit there job, what college should they pick Steve says that he has something to offer for people that listen to this show. So many people ask themselves should i quit this or that but theres no way that Steve or his crew can make that decision for them but he can give them a framework to those people for making those decisions. Out of this framework was born a website called freakonomicsexperiements.com which will walk you through a couple of steps if you are uncertain about a decision you are trying to make.

Economists are always trying to figure out at the margin would it better to go one way or another and in the real world we dont have that option to live two lives. Problems that people have with the most difficulty deciding are important things.

Steve Levitt said that when you come to a point in life and you have to make decisions its costly, you spend too much time thinking about it.

The coin toss is with a random coin and before you flip the coin Steve makes you think a little bit about your decisions and then asks you a few questions. By the time they get done with the survey you may have figured out what you want to do but for those who are still perplexed with the decisions they will flip the coin for you and for most people they feel regret when they flip it themselves often asking themselves they wished they never did that, so when someone else flips the coin for them, we feel less regret. Then Steve will ask you to make a pledge, and then to just stay in touch and tell them how your life has been since you made the decision you chose.

The people that make real world big decisions, their changes do them better in life. Whenever your ont he margin you should have a default role and you should go for the change.

A New Mom And The President of Iceland

In 2011 there was an issue between Iceland, Britain, and the Dutch. Iceland was known for their international banking centers. Hundreds of thousands of people had savings accounts and invested money and had high interest rates that they were proud of but in 2008 the banks failed and people who were overseas could not get any money out. Iceland was now in a very difficult situation. 

In Iceland everything needs to be signed by the President who is as powerful as the Queen of England so in order for this to work they had to go to the Presidents house. People were standing outside the Presidents house with red light flares because they were so upset. The President ended up doing a veto which is a constitutional right to reject a decision or proposal made by a law-making body on the bill which he has never done before because this was such a serious matter. People were so upset with this decision that they voted NO to giving money to the Britains and the dutch. So the President set up one more vote. Stephon said that Iceland is not required to pay the money for what was lost from the banks. People are undecided about to vote yes or no. why should the citizens of Iceland pay for the britians and the dutch. The professor that was spoken to said that he was thinking about movie out of the country because it has become that bad. He said that the economy has shrunk and unemployment has sky rocked. Its not fair that people bought shares and now don't have the money that they invested in. Its not fair that we trust the banks and the banks can just walk away. People trusted the banks and the currency way to much. Land cruisers, computers, flat screen TVs were very very cheap says Hitha.

The debt market just wants to get repaid in the end. If bond guys can make money and lend it to us in Iceland then they will. Clayton Nash says he put money in one of these accounts. He put 42 thousands pounds and he got all his money back. The British government gave the depositors there money back to the dutch and they did the same to the Netherlands. Basically if you vote yes the little nation will be repaying the gigantic other population. Everywhere people went they were talking about interest rates. People in Iceland are well educated and full of life to know what they are voting on but then you also have to look at the other people who have jobs which are getting paid for working, the President asked us to read about what we are voting for but hes not paying us to do so so why should we do it says Hitha. She voted NO because this decision should go back to the international courts. But her boyfriend voted YES because the grounds that we stand on doesn't trust foreigners sends a really bad signal

In the end after the case went to the international court and the court issued its decision that Iceland didnt have to pay any money back. Refusing to pay hasn't caused much damage to Iceland and Iceland and the UK can still be friends again. The British and Dutch government still are getting money from insurance but they wont get everything they wanted and its not too bad for them.

     Herbalife International is a  global international company that sells weight loss and skin care products. In the podcast it was explained that Bill Ackman was saying that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme which is considered a pyramid if participants obtain their monetary benefits primarily form recruitment rather than the sale of goods and services to consumers. Bill Ackman placed a 1 million dollar bet against Herbalife saying "Herbalife is a verbal scheme". After Bill made that comment Herbalife plunged 20%.

The reason why I believe that Herbalife is a scheme is because of the points that were made in the podcast that made sense. Herbalife is a big company but I have never heard of any brands by them. Formula 1 is something that is sold by Herbalife but has never been heard up and does the same thing as slim fast but slim fast is a popular brand name. Also, the numbers look odd. The company spends nothing on advertising and they don't sell there product in stores they are sold exclusively out of homes of people. 

Maryanne is in charge of Will Frado who is a independent distributor for Herbalife, so every time Will sells something for the company he has to go threw Maryanne who then gets part of the money of the sale. Basically the way people make the money is by recruiting sales people because then everyone works off everyone for the sale. Avon is a multilevel marketing company for example. What is illegal in this process is if people are selling Herbalife to people who don't actually want to drink the product. so those people who are buying the product but don't actually use is are just buying it to become a distributor to make the money.

Bill Ackman said that he spent well over a million dollars to put Herbalife into shortage. Bill Ackman is the man who said that Herbalife was a pyramid scheme. Either you can short the stock or you can buy the stock and how great it is.


 If Ackman is right the Herbalife company that reports roughly $4 billion in annual sales and a network of 3.2 million salespeople in 87 countries, could be shut down by the Federal Trade Commission.




 For years Herbalife has been referred to as nothing but a pyramid scheme. Because of the pyramid scheme the scandal involving Herbalife products and the number of people being ripped off by Herbalife ment that the company built up the worst reputations of all the multi-level marketing companies. So many people have failed to make money as a Herbalife distributor that most people refuse to get involved, let alone purchase Herbalife products.

I AM A GENIUS

    



1. The main point of this article is that genius in itself does not create great works or accomplishment on a grade scale. It accepts that people are born with enriched abilities that vary from person to person. It does not suggest that if you work really hard you can achieve being a genius it simple says that those who achieved great things did so by increasing their natural abilities through hard work that it didn’t simply land in their laps due to their “gift”. The findings did surprise me because its true that many people want to win but don’t want to work hard to win. It’s not going to be handed to you no matter how smart you are.

2.     2.The author’s view of talent is that its something you have to work for something. Its not handed to you. His view on talent changed throughout his life because when he was younger his mother had told him that he was a genius so he ran with the idea, but later on in life he realized that he might have to out work other or else his writing would count for little. He also said at the end of the article “…how smart you are doesn’t mean jack, and that you have to work demonically regardless”, meaning you have to put in time to get what you want.

3.      3. Basically the characteristics are that success isn’t going to be handed to you no matter what your innate talents are. The characteristics that I found were in this article that were more important than innate talent are hand-eye coordination, perspiration, inspiration, supportive environments, and important mentors.

4.    4.  Steve Hawking views those who boast about their IQs as being losers.

5.    5.  I think the author said that hard work could either encourage you or overwhelm you because it simply true. Either you make up your mind to work hard for something that you really want and can deal with the work that’s comes with getting what you want, or you could be scared off by the amount of work that comes with getting what you want and dismiss the whole idea of success to being with.

6.    6.  I think you assigned this reading because you are trying to show us that anyone can become a genius. Your not born with it, you don’t naturally have it, but you have to want it. And in order to want something you have to work hard to get it, and that what all of us in the class should do. Work hard to get where we want to be.

      I would love to be a genius. most people wish they WERE a genius but according to David Dobbs people aren't just born a genius, they have to work at it just like athletes have to work hard to become professional athletes. If you want to become something you have to put in the effort, or train for it, or time in becoming what you want. Hard work isn't everything though. A supportive environment and supportive people can help pave the way towards your success. Studies have shown that all high achievers have had some source of a mentor in there life to help guide them in the right direction. One study that Dobbs mentioned, involved music students at New York's elite Julliard School and winners of the high school level Westinghouse Science Talent Search. It was found that the Julliard students realized they had full potential when they had one-on-one relationships with their mentors. But most of the Westinghouse winners went on to college without finding mentors to help them through there talent and as a result, only half of them ended up going through with science, and only few of them actually got distinction. So the environment really does play a big role in becoming a genius. You  cant become something over night everybody has to work for what they want. Take Olympic athletes for example they train for years to become where they want to be. with the help of supportive people and environments and the time and effort that you put in to get what you want out then you are a genius. That's why i consider myself a genius because i have put in alot of time to be where i am now with a lot of help from a lot of people. :)