Econ 490 Fall Alan Krueger

Through my teenage years I gained most of my knowledge of teams from my Boy Scout troop, where I had been involved in every level of the organization. To break down the basic workings of troop activities, the general flow is something like this: scouts in the eighth grade or younger comprise most of the members of the troop and are grouped into patrols of same-aged scouts that range in size from six to fifteen, give or take, depending on the amount of same aged kids. Upon entering high school, the scouts that still remained in the troop (most tend to drop out shortly into high school, as other time commitments pop up) were given a green shirt (instead of the usual tan), the patrol was disbanded outside of formal organizational purposes, and scouts were assigned a younger patrol to work with. Among these “senior” scouts, one was elected to be the Junior Assistant Scoutmaster (or JASM), whose job it was to run meetings, coordinate the other senior scouts, and report back up to the a...

The ethics of opportunism is a fascinating subject, and its one that I’ve been pondering, perhaps in a different light, for quite a while now. Opportunism plays a key role in understanding ethics and morality on the meta level. In my own study of ethics, I’ve found that all people can be broken down into two camps of ethical thinking: objective moralists and subjective moralists. To broadly define the two, objective moralists tend to believe in absolute truth, and with that tend to follow more traditional ideas of virtuous, or “good” behavior. Subjective moralists believe that truth lies in the experience of an individual, creating a system of loosely defined “good” and “bad”, “right” and “wrong”, favoring a system around “dialogue, not debate” wherein all viewpoints are held as equally ethical (so long as they’re within the Overton Window of polite society).   Before I go any further, I would like to point out that I place myself in the objectivist camp, and therefore my anal...

The ‘organization’, in its broadest definition, is something with which all people interact with on a daily basis. For me specifically, these interactions can largely be broken down into three categories of employment, education, and extracurricular involvement. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the role of management in both the former — wherein I have seen the benefits of proper management and the pitfalls that arise from its absence—and the latter, wherein I’ve been tasked on multiple occasions to take on the role of a manager.  In my experience with organizations, the time of the most significant change and instability is when management changes. For instance, this summer I was a grocery store clerk working part time hours to supplement my income while I took summer courses. While on a shift-to-shift basis I would have any number of immediate supervisors, all of us who worked on the front end reported to the same front-end manager, who I shall refer to as Bob. Bob a...