Econ 490 Fall Alan Krueger

I often describe myself as a very risk-averse person, and my college life has been an example of that. From a practical standpoint, I think attending a university to gain knowledge is functionally useless; the whole of human knowledge is available online in my pocket at my demand. I also tend to shy away from the necessitation of most accreditations, since I tend to lump most of them into the fallacy of argument from authority. When I describe why I’m on this campus, I almost always use the phrase “I’m here to buy a degree.” Barring the small likelihood of failing out, you achieve the requisite accreditation via an investment of four years and thousands of dollars. It’s a buy-in similar enough in my mind to the medallion system that taxi drivers have. However, the fact of the matter is, in this country at this time, a baccalaureate is required for good job placement, and the risk-averse person wants a steady job. Getting a degree, thought, requires such lofty financial commitment ...

Halfway through the semester is a good point to stop and evaluate blogging as an exercise, as well as a meta-analysis of the themes of my own posts. I added the class a week into the semester due to some problems with scheduling, and so I believe I missed some of the opening discussion on what a blog post should entail. The first substantive one that I wrote was on my own experience with organizations, which I was told via comment was too across the board: shallow analysis of a few different organizations, rather than a treatise on one. To some extent, I think that’s a little unfair of an analysis, I had experience at many organizations and I felt by reading the prompt that week it would be best to share things from many angles. Organizations are full of different people doing different tasks, and I felt that offering perspective from a few different sources would be a beneficial assessment. The next week; however, the prompt was perhaps unclear to me, or perhaps less interestin...