An interesting weather question?

Claim: At any given moment, there is a spot on Earth where there is no wind.

Proof: ??

For those who already know the proof, try to think of other applications of this rather flexible little idea. Another one I like is the fact that there is always a point somewhere on Earth's surface where the temperature is the same at that point and at the point on exactly the other side of the Earth (the antipode).

For a greater challenge, think about the set of points where the wind is not moving and see if you can say anything about that set over time (ie, from moment to moment).

(Also, I'm ignoring artifical vacuums, inside sealed houses, whatever. I just want to think of the atmosphere as a connected set.)

Economics Question: College Returns vs. Tuition Costs

No one's posting on the blog. In an effort to liven up discussion, I thought I'd occasionally post some economic questions or puzzles that I've been thinking about recently. Hopefully people can spend a few minutes thinking about the issue and we can get an actual discussion about economics going.

One question I was thinking about yesterday is about the rising wage premium over the past 25 years for college graduates. It's a pretty well accepted fact that, even though the supply of college graduates has increased over that time period, the return from going to college has increased even more. There has been just an enormous increase in the return from becoming skilled over the past 25 years. There's a lot of interesting issues about the causes of this increase in the skill premium in the U.S. which I've been going over for the past two weeks in my applied micro class, such as inequality concerns, changing marginal productivities, and whether the trend is supply or demand driven.

My question, however, relates this data to the market for college. When you look at tuition costs over the same time period, you see a similar trend, but with a much smaller magnitude. Rough estimates say that college tuition costs have reduced the apparent gain in the skill premium by as much as 50%. The question: only 50%??? The undergraduate market is huge, with millions of consumers and a few thousand suppliers. Why are there still profits to be had by the millions of consumers? Shouldn't the returns from going to college equal the costs of going to college? Note that college as signalling isn't particularly germane to this question - the return is the return, regardless of whether it's a productivity improvement or a signalling game.

With some help from a friend, I have an answer I like. But I'm curious to hear what other people think is going on.

teach us all how to be men

I remember when I met Buck O'Neil as a high school student at Rockhurst. In our personal exchange, as well as in his talk to the student body, I was so impressed by what a gentleman he was, in the truest sense of the word. He was graceful and elegant, yet very masculine. He was gentle, yet very strong. He would hold the door open for a woman because that's the right thing to do, not because he was trying to make a point or conform to some social norm. He would say please and thank you because he was pleased and wanted to thank.

He was a man who witnessed -- indeed, who made -- so much history; in spite of this, you felt like you could sit down, have a couple of beers, and shoot the shit about anything from fishing to the current state of race-relations. He had done so much for baseball and and so much for blacks, but what impressed me most about him was not his accomplishments -- not the fact that he was the first black major league coach or that he was so successful with the Monarchs or that he was so damn good at hitting that baseball or that he signed Lou Brock and Ernie Banks -- indeed, not his accomplishments. Who he was, not what he did, was most impressive.

I remember most that I wanted to be like Buck.

Reggie Jackson said it all: "What a fabulous human being. He was a blessing for all of us. I believe that people like Buck and Rachel Robinson and Martin Luther King and Mother Teresa are angels that walk on earth to give us all a greater understanding of what it means to be human. I'm not sad for him. He had a long, full life and I hope I'm as lucky, but I'm sad for us."

When, for reasons passing understanding, Buck was denied entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame earlier this year, his modesty shown through brighter than ever. "Shed no tears for Buck...Just keep loving old Buck."

Say a prayer for old Buck today, my friends; it's hard to say when anyone in baseball, or anyone else for that matter, will enter into public life again and teach us all how to be men. Kansas City and the world lost a giant last night.

Macro Midterm

Yeah, 3rd of October, Midterms.

I'd say that over the past weekend, I've become more familiar with the principle theorems and proofs of dynamic programming than I ever thought possible (basically Stokey-Lucas chps. 3-6). Unfortunately, none of this was really on my midterm.

That said, I think the only change I would've made to my preparation would be to have done even more practice problems (from previous years exams, problem sets, other problem sets somewhere on the web, etc).

For example, I had seen an old problem set (2004 or so) that had a question just like the first one on my midterm, but for some reason chose not to figure it out over the weekend. Hence, I wasn't really prepared to answer it on the exam (oh well), but did my best at 2 and 3 which I was somewhat ready for. Fortunately, our TA told us afterward that we didn't really have time to answer all of it anyways, "which is good, because then you get to choose which problems you want to solve..." or so he says. In any event... maybe there's time now to squeak out an NSF proposal... maybe.

I noticed the other day that Mike has invited most of the new RAs to participate in the blog. I think that's really cool -- and so I'd just like to reiterate that anyone should feel welcome to talk about anything they want here (including whether the Matrix is a martial arts movie or not) whether its related to econ or not.

So that's all from MN. Not too cold yet, either, so I got that goin for me, which is nice.

Gnight...