Econ 136: Week 8 Tasks

ECON 136:  Week 8 Tasks

Updated 3/17 to incorporate reading for Wednesday.

Hope you had a renewing and (where needed) healing Break. 

Individual Conferences

I’d like to check in with each of you about how the semester is going.   If you’ve fallen behind in some of our tasks, this is a good time to talk through how best to catch up.  If there is a topic in the revised syllabus you’d like to cover in more depth, let’s discuss.   This might be a good time to go over one of your midterm  rewrites.  (If you haven’t picked up your graded exam, copies will be available first thing Monday morning in Dalton 114.)

Before you retire Sunday night, please choose a meeting slot in the Week 8 block in the Working with Economic Data Moodle site.

Monday:  Solving Externality and Public Goods Problems

Five hardy souls made it to class on the 7th.   So I’ll ask them to take the lead in helping the rest of us work through the sort of problems someone who understands the externality and public goods market failure ought to be able to solve. 

Preparing for class:

Review or  complete the  Week 7 Tasks.    I’ve reset the Sapling Learnng problem sets to be due Monday at 3am.

Wednesday:  Cost-Benefit Analysis

The price that emerges in a competitive market equilibrium communicates both opportunity cost and marginal social benefit (i.e., willingness to pay for the last unit produced).   Provision of public goods by government requires some process of discerning benefits and deciding whether and how much of the service to provide.

Preparing for class:

Complete question 1 from Monday's handout and see how far you can get on question 2.

The Tietenberg reading puts the supply-demand framework we have been using in a different light:   Suppose your were charged with maximizing the well-being of the general public or of someone who has hired you as an agent to manage their affairs through the purchase of some good or service.   How would you go about doing so?

Please bring your laptop to class.

Friday:   The Wissahickon Creek corridor as a Public Good

360 Students:  Meet at Pem Arch at 10:00am  for Wissahickon Field Trip 

Non-360 Students:  Meet in Dalton 6 at 9:10 to talk about the decision to add the Wissahickon Creek corridor to Fairmount Park.

Read these pages from the pdf (attached) of

Contosta, D. and D. Franklin (2010).  Metropolitan Paradise:  The Struggle for Nature in the City, Philadelphia's Wissahickon Valley 1620-2020.  Saint Josephs University Press.  Excerpts from Vol. 2.

• Start at the bracket on pdf page 2, continue to pdf page 6 and the top of pdf pages 7 and 8.
• The box on pdf pages 7 and 8
• Pdf page 9, starting at the bracket, and 10. 

Think about who paid to acquire the land that became the Wissahickon portion of Farimount Park.

Please bring your laptop to class.