Just blows your mind

“…I’ll just warn you right now that you’re lacking the key to her heart.”

“And what’s that?”

“A job at Goldman Sachs. That’s what her boyfriend has. His stated ambition is to be worth a hundred million at age 30.”

(And i was really just laughing real loud when i turned the page to see “A job at Goldman Sachs…”)

Jon Franzen’s book just gets better and better and better and blows your mind multiple times every time (not unlike an Apple product). The dude seems to have the whole culture of the 21st and 20th century uploaded in his head, and he’s 51…

“If you’re good, you’re for finance”

To avoid demonising the already “morally condemned” financial industry, let’s put aside our tinted glasses and look at reality normally, shall we?

Two of the all time epic economists, Paul Samuelson and John Maynard Keynes were once heavily involved with all things evil in finance, i.e. trading, speculating, hedging, something that Mr Sowden would deem as a “scumbag-of-the-earth” activities. (I guess I bought into all that fundamentalist teaching for a while)

Well, Samuelson co-founded Commodities Corporation along with other PhD whizz kids which at its peak raked in more income than quite a few of the Fortune 500 firms. CC eventually became the forerunner to GS’ Hedge Fund Strategies so you can see how big these things can be.

Keynes too, played the magic of the market by SPECULATING (ouch, what a scumbag) with HIGH LEVERAGE trading currencies. He got like >50,000 pounds off all these by 1924…

So yeah, to the self-righteous imma-study-econs-for-academic-sake-for-the-purposeful-use-towards-society person, C’MON SCREW IT and let’s all HOP INTO THE BANGWAGON (I typed BANG accidentally, so let’s just leave it as that) OF DECADENCE! Well even if you’re NOT studying econs, hop on too! The lure of the dark side is just irresistible, you’ve got to admit.

Bad economics

First serious post in 5892493 years, apparently inspired by thinking too much about pointless issues.

Anywhere here’s an attempt into treading the waters of behavioural econs with something uniquely uh, Singapore. Because I think i’ve forgotten much fanciful concepts/theories and lack empirical evidences, this is clearly uneconomic and not the way you should answer your H2 essay qn, or write a rigourous paper, or try to look smart, but nonetheless, some introspection on steroids.

THE CONTEXT: $100 entrance fees into the casino

Contrary to the popular (neoclassical and logically Singaporean) belief that setting a ($100) cost to any illicit/vice activities would intuitively decrease the incidence of vice, addiction is probably a uniquely difficult variable to model into cost-benefit analysis and shouldn’t be analysed with standard demand/supply frameworks.

1) The entrance fee only reinforces the need to gamble, not curb it. No rational (or irrational, depends on what you define as rational) football team concedes defeat if given a (hypothetical) 2-point handicap against another team even before kick off. They just fight harder throughout the whole game, right?

2) The (official) rationale of a fee is to “discourage potential gamblers” or whatever – not interested to quote verbatim. Which clearly fails when you consider the magnitude at which ‘problem gamblers’ gamble with; $100 is just another cost. (The standard layman argument, all of which can be found on brainless forums, so shan’t elaborate.)

3) So, premise 1) and 2) just illustrate a higher fixed cost for ‘problem gamblers’ which only results in greater volume of gambling to cover losses, since exhilaration feeds addiction. In fact, it’s a SNOWBALL effect starting with the initial $100 loss.

4) This is a purely counterproductive policy. The people to be protected from themselves through this policy are actually coerced to crash and burn – welfare loss. And this is not even considering the welfare loss by normal, curious citizens who are inclined to explore the casino, but are otherwise not inclined to.

5) Bad economics in action, or could it just be GOOD PROFITEERING?

On second thought, econs papers looks drastically nonsensical with esoteric English. Layman talk does quite fine in fact. Maybe topped with some appropriate math and empirical research would make it just suitable?

Then again, what use are they?