The pre paper post

Originally it came with whole lots of warnings.  No I’m not happy with it.  It’s hard to write when you are hiding yourself, and have a page limit for a difficult question.  I really wanted a lot of time to explain myself (such a me thing).  I feel like I really do need to write up a whole thing on this topic, I just don’t know when.  I’m not an econ student: I know plenty of hard core econ students here (It’s the University of Chicago, it would be odd not to have them.)  Here are your set.  They really should be expanded on, but that’s ok.

I took one economics course, it was non-mathematical, Intro Macro.  I was a pest like all hell, and I finished all but I think three? chapters of the textbook we weren’t supposed to read (the micro side).  I also nearly flunked the class because I insisted on reading the Wall Street Journal Every Day, listening to the banking streams of This American Life, and even reading some of the non-mathematical papers of Dr. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel prize winner, for fun.  This made me into a local heterodox with not enough math skills.  A very Shana thing to be.

Though in one private conversation with the professor, who kept trying to insist to me that I should simplify and stick to his answers, I got him to admit that if technology changes any more quickly, we will leave those who don’t understand it behind.  I’m heterodox enough to think that traditional (aka Walrussian) economics do not factor in information as money and as disparities in the marketplace as a disruptive power.

Further, I never ended up disclosing that

A) I’m apparently some sort of major commentator (I find this funny, I’m a college student in an Art Program, my MFA buddy even finds the disparity  weird) on a major Venture Capitalist‘s blog, who’s companies were featured in OUR CLASS READING!!!! (Dot.Con talks an awful lot about the Street and Kozmos.  Flatiron Partners even got a footnote.)  It’s really hard to hide that.

B) My father sells refurbished teleconferencing equipment that runs on some sort of Internet protocol and my mom is a computer programmer.  I’ve been hanging around this stuff since I was 3.  Before this, oddly enough, my dad was a commodities broker, including in derivatives, so he really loved computers… (There is actually some sort of weird connection between him, the Hunt Silver runup, and Spreadsheet software….)

C) The relative that my family still continues to have a fight with (and I’m not sure why, don’t ask me) and therefore I never really had a strong relationship with (as in if you asked me what’s up with this guy for the past 3 years I would not know, because other family relationships have soured), happens/ed to own an ISP.

D) if we booted up all the computers in my parents house, including all the dusty ones, I think there would be more than 5 or 6 times the amount of computers than people.  And that would be a low estimate.

e) I’m trying to do a Bachelors in what is called New media, or Net Art.  Some subspecialty areas within that include interaction, tactical media, information networks, and sociability, and the location of the human.  It’s considered very difficult and cutting edge, and computer-y.  If you asked me what a good art project is, it is to find a way to get a massive amount of users to tag a benign page with curse words in delicious so that the curse words are stuck as the metadata.  To show how awkward the system is and how the system can really be screwed with since we are the human actors in it.  (These sorts of projects are incredibly difficult to pull off, and I am looking for long term help…grrr)

That all had to be hidden.  As a result, I would totally redraft it, or write the other topic.

Business history from 1980′s onward.

The question:

Did Alan Greenspan have it right when he said the 90s saw a massive wave of “irrational exuberance”?  Was the dot.com revolution just a modern day version of “tulip mania”?  In your answer, offer a point of view on if you think business fundamentals related to understanding economic value of companies changed.

The topic I didn’t do:

2. Was the “new economy” actually new? Was it more similar to or different from that which preceded it?

(I would have had to talk about enron and long term, and it just felt ehhhh)