Economics: My Future Investments

This term in Economics, we've been discussing the book Freakonomics, and connecting the situations and ideas that we were reading about to the real world. We've also been discussing opportunity cost, real cost, loans, interest, compounding interest, and more. Through these lessons we've learned about supply and demand and looked at how they both can shift overtime.

We visited the Lyft company in Chicago and they talked about their supply and demand with us. During that field experience, I learned that the higher the demand, the higher a price on a ride may be. But the lower the demand, then the lower the price is. If there aren't a good amount of suppliers then the demand may be somewhere else. For example; Demand may be higher downtown Chicago during rush hour because so many people are trying to get home all at once. We also listened to people at Chicago Ideas Week talk about algorithms and how data on the internet is used and collected by other companies or social networks. Chicago Ideas Week is when influential people from any field discuss important and relevant topics. At the end, the youth can ask questions about the topic. In this project, we are calculating our true cost of college, lifetime earnings, and how much those decisions will cost us. Through these decisions there are assumptions about your future career path. These assumptions help you decide what choice is best and how much money and time you could be saving and making. At the end, this project demonstrated my life investments and what I'm gaining from investing my time and money into college and my career.

Introducing my career choice (AS,2019)

I interviewed Fred Camper, a film professor at Columbia College and asked him about the several decisions he has made throughout his career. He told me a story about one of his most important decisions and the incentives that were involved with the decision making.

"Most of the college courses I teach are in film. In the last two or three years, I decided to place ever more stress on precise description and factual accuracy. This includes things like many points off for spelling a name wrong, calling a camera movement a zoom, and so on. My assignments now require precise descriptions of individual shots, perhaps a list of a few shots in a sequence and an analysis of how they function, of what their effects are, not based so much on content as on camera angle, rhythm, editing, lighting, and other cinematic elements.

Only gradually did I come to realize that this decision was a response to the toxic political environment created in part by the current American president, in which lies are said to be facts, actual facts are disparaged, blustering emotion substitutes for reason, and, lately, those who strive to uphold our democracy and our Constitution are threatened with the death penalty. Cinema is often, and for many, a highly emotional medium, and I think one way to approach it, and one way to fight the culture of rage and lies that seems ever more dominant, is to ask students to view films with great care directed toward an understanding not only of the emotions and ideas they bring into being, but of how the process of creating emotion and meaning works. The hope is that thereby they learn to get some distance from immediate emotional stimulation, and come to understand how it can happen, and also learn the value of starting with accurate facts.

The alternatives were to continue on as I had been, doing what was described above but less of it.

The incentives were that my boss offered financial bonuses for every student who learned film better. No, that was a joke, a kind of bitter parody of the management-business bias behind the question. The incentives that went into the decision were my seeking a way to mitigate the utter despair at the current downward spiral that human civilization seems to be to be locked into, and my thought that I could make some small contribution in the opposite direction."

- Fred Camper

I really enjoyed this project because it gave me a new perspective of what my life would be like after high school and college. It also made me think more about the path I want to be on in order to be successful and accomplish my goals. This project motivated me and allowed me to think critically about each choice I was making. 

Citations:

“Archivists, Curators, and Museum Workers : Occupational Outlook Handbook:” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov/ooh/education-training-and-library/curators-museum-technicians-and-conservators.htm.

“How Much Successful Archivists Make In 2017.” OwlGuru.com - Find A Career That You Love, www.owlguru.com/career/archivists/salary/.

“Interest Rates and Fees.” Federal Student Aid, 1 July 2019, studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/interest-rates.

“New York University Tuition And Fees.” College Factual, 13 Sept. 2019, www.collegefactual.com/colleges/new-york-university/paying-for-college/tuition-and-fees/.