Anyway Cicero

yes

yay it’s the weekend (time to review everything ive said and done to see if im a fundamentally good person)

Saw this in my Roman economics book and I just had to sit there stunned for a moment. The fastest growing economy in the 1600s hit 0.2%. For comparison, the average country's growth last year was 2.7% (in real GDP), or thirteen times as much. A huge portion of that is thanks to improvements in human capital: public schools, healthcare, improved access to nutrition, and social safety nets. Another big part, the rate of technological progress, increases in proportion to human capital. I suspect that reduced prevalence of war also plays a role.

Like shit, man, if I were a rational capitalist, I should want higher taxes if the money would go to public education, mental health and addiction recovery programs, low-income assistance, and universal healthcare. I should be more anti-war than the goddamn Pope. The slight increase in my tax rate would be plenty offset by the improved skills and productivity of my workers, the disposable income of my customers, and decreases in my personal cost of healthcare and education.

But that's a rational, impartial capitalist. Someone who isn't beholden to shareholders, or trying to win votes. One of the weirdest things in economics is how individuals trying to do what's profitable for themselves can produce less profitable outcomes for everyone, including themselves.

(From "Human Capital and Economic Growth" by Richard Saller, in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel.)

The number one phrase I have adopted into my lexicon from ACD Sherlock Holmes is all the times Watson says “I cudgeled my brains” when he’s trying and failing to think through a mystery. Huge mood, deeply relatable, I too spend far too much time cudgeling my brains with no real result

study tip!! how i write essays

going from a long, intensive classical education to my current history major, i've had to write a lot of papers. at this point, i can write a 5 page paper in a few hours, and just a couple weeks ago i wrote a 20 page paper in a single day. i graduated valedictorian with this method (current cGPA of 4.0!) so i thought i'd share how i write them! grab some coffee and settle in - it'll be a long post, but i promise it'll be worth it. :)

first, the topic. if you don't have an assigned topic, pick something that fascinates you, something that you could write pages and pages about. you will. if your topic is assigned, find something in it that you find fascinating. even if you find your topic completely boring, there's always something interesting to glean from it! once you find this, you'll gain motivation, and that's half the battle.

write down a basic outline. when i say basic, i mean barebones. just a vague, 3-point general idea of what you think you might write your paper about. this will guide you in your research! you don't need to worry about writing your full outline just yet.

sources. after you have a basic list of points, it's time to find sources! if they're already assigned, you can skip this step. most of the time they aren't, though. this is the most important part of your paper. you can go to google scholar to find really good academic journals and studies!

generally, the number of sources you have depends on the length of your paper! a good guide is that your amount of sources should number half the length of your paper. so if you have a 5 page paper, 2-3 is a good way to go. if you have a 20 page paper, you'll want around 10.

evidence. skim over your sources and categorize each one under the point you made earlier. this will mean you have a quick reference guide when you're writing, so you don't have to go through a big list of sources when you're looking for evidence! under each source, put a few bullet points talking about the info that you can use for your paper.

outline. this part may seem daunting. i promise, though, it's one of the easiest parts of the paper! you may feel tempted to skip it, but having an outline makes your paper sound better and makes it easier and quicker to write. use the sources and bullet point info you used earlier to fill out your outline. start broad and general, then add details as you do your research! your outline should be about half the length of your paper. don't worry about making it super scholarly - this is just for you, so make it as informal and easy to understand as you want! be stupid, throw in memes, whatever gets it written!

every outline should include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. i can go over the structure of an outline in another post, but remember the 3 points you thought up earlier? these will form your entire outline, and eventually your essay!

finally, write! open a blank google doc and view it side by side with your outline. once you get started, it's a lot easier to finish than you'd think, especially if you took the time to outline! this is when you can make your dumb outline into something that would make the ancient philosophers proud. don't worry about perfection. just write it as you go. you can edit it later!

quotes/evidence. once you've finished your rough draft, it's time to add the evidence! some profs want quotes, others want you to paraphrase. either way, go through your paper and put in the evidence you researched earlier. don't worry about citations just yet - just put in the link in a comment on your rough draft. it won't be hard to fix it up later.

edit!! please, please don't finish your rough draft and be done with it. you can save so many points by going over it again instead of submitting it in a rushed 3am haze. fix spelling and grammar, add citations and a reference page, edit for clarity, anything you need to make it sound like the best paper you can write! if you're proud of it by the end, you know you've done something right.

congrats, you did it!! make sure you start your paper early and don't wait till the night before - your grade will thank you <3

I'm enjoying The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy so far, but it's rather high level, and it's been a few years since I last studied economics. So, I picked up a little refresher. And read the whole thing in a day.

The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman, is very, very good.

Graphic novels are great for bringing dry subjects to life. Klein and Bauman's examples show that economics is about people making choices, and their choices affecting each other's lives:

And it helps put abstract concepts into concrete terms:

The text is funny and easy to follow, even if you hate math and know nothing about economics. I think it's a very good introduction to how capitalism is supposed to work, in theory. You can certainly criticize capitalism - I do - but these books will show you the nature of the beast that we're up against.

It's very difficult for an economics book to be politically neutral. But Klein and Bauman's work is factual, avoids strongly right-wing or left-wing slants, and they acknowledge systemic problems like colonialism, exploitation of poor communities, and climate change. They also offer a few suggestions for addressing these problems. The books are USA-centric but include examples from other countries, too.

Oh yeah, there's actually two books. One for micro-economics, and one for macro-economics.

Microeconomics looks at a single individual, business, or market. So volume one covers:

Marginal utility and cost

Supply and demand

Cost-benefit analysis

How markets self-organize and stabilize

Auctions

Risk

How interest rates work

Present vs. future value of a good

Information asymmetry

What makes a market competitive or not

Game theory, including the prisoner's dilemma and the tragedy of the commons

How taxation affects markets

Price and demand elasticity

Macroeconomics looks at an entire economy, or multiple economies, and how they interact. Volume two explores:

Gross Domestic Product

How to measure quality of life

Monetary policy and fiscal policy

Unemployment

Inflation and deflation

Classical vs. Keynesian economics

Free trade vs. protectionism

Aging populations

Currency exchange

Foreign aid and exploitation

Climate change and pollution

Addressing global poverty and inequality

Strategies for mitigating economic crashes

However, these books do not cover:

Marxist and socialist views of economics

Effects of colonialism and discrimination

The role of unions

Social safety nets

Indigenous and traditional societies' economics

Behavioral economics

Personal finance

Stock markets

What causes economic bubbles and crashes

And probably more things I forgot

They're not a substitute for a real textbook or college course. But they're a great starting point, and a fun read.

*it’s

I love when you find an author who just has a good flavor to their writing. It could be the way they handle characters, the way they use certain tropes or themes, even the specific lilt of their words. Its familiar and comforting and carries across different stories, like coming back to a place of comfort and recognizing the furniture.

November in the Sherlock Holmes Canon

The fact that slaves had a different legal status from free men was not considered particularly outrageous: women and minors shared diminished status. In reality, minors still do today.

Now there's an uncomfortable parallel to sit with.

I like that Vivenza included it, though. It made me stop and think for a moment about my own beliefs.

I agree that kids and teens are treated unjustly in my culture. So, what freedoms should minors have that they currently don't? How do you draw the line between protection and suppression? How much child abuse occurs because children are inherently more vulnerable, and how much occurs because we put them in situations ripe for abuse, and don't take their feelings or demands seriously? I honestly don't know.

It also made me look up the children's rights and youth rights movements, which are apparently two different things. And one is much more radical than the other.

I'm gonna have to think on this one for a while...

(Gloria Vivenza, “Roman Economic Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel.)