Professor Michele Boldrin's course
http://www.econ.umn.edu/~mboldrin/
He is the professor from Minnesota who is going to bother me for this two weeks. He looks quite like some actor in this picture.On his homepage you could see him and his family.
If our bosses didn't threaten us that this course would be counted in the next term's final achievements, I may not have taken it. I got two papers to finish in the next month and yet I still haven't started them.
But anyway he is an romantic Italian, an funny boyish guy, always making jokes in class. He is even older than my father, and yet called himself a clown in class.
He will give us some lectures about innovation and growth.
In the past two days, he has given us an introduction. I can understand most of his English, though he has strong accent and rolls 'r' almost everywhere, but he is better than some French last year in Beijing.
Yesterday he gave us a lecture on innovation and technology.
In the classic Solow Model, technology A enters the production function as an exogenous parameter growing at constant rate. And it enters attached to labor force L, called effective labor. That is Y=F(K, AL). Boldrin said this kind of modelling technology is not a bad idea but a stupid idea, because economists know little of technology so they take this kind of shortcut approach, It's not like real world and what we should try is to model it more like real world.
He tried to give us a concept about innovation, and told us the difference between innovation and public goods. Innovations under no copy rights have something in common with public goods, but still they are quite different.
I was a little sleepy last evening and didn't catch up with him sometimes. Then he took Mozart for an innovation example.He recommended the movie Amadeus to us and said it's a good movie. In that movie, Mozart composed Figaro's wedding and simply gave the manuscript to the buyer in exchange for some money.The buyer owned the manuscript and then made copies and sold them. Mozart's composition is an innovational activity under no copy rights, but as long as he could get income larger than his costs, there is an incentive for him to do it, and then we get Mozart's heavenly music.
Quote: " Do you know Figaro? It's that 'ah~ah~ah~ah~~~~~'......not 'Figaro Figaro Figaro Figarofigarofigaro...' that's Rossini."
Ha~~what a musical professor. Someone told me he once danced to the cellphone ringing in his class.
He is the professor from Minnesota who is going to bother me for this two weeks. He looks quite like some actor in this picture.On his homepage you could see him and his family.
If our bosses didn't threaten us that this course would be counted in the next term's final achievements, I may not have taken it. I got two papers to finish in the next month and yet I still haven't started them.
But anyway he is an romantic Italian, an funny boyish guy, always making jokes in class. He is even older than my father, and yet called himself a clown in class.
He will give us some lectures about innovation and growth.
In the past two days, he has given us an introduction. I can understand most of his English, though he has strong accent and rolls 'r' almost everywhere, but he is better than some French last year in Beijing.
Yesterday he gave us a lecture on innovation and technology.
In the classic Solow Model, technology A enters the production function as an exogenous parameter growing at constant rate. And it enters attached to labor force L, called effective labor. That is Y=F(K, AL). Boldrin said this kind of modelling technology is not a bad idea but a stupid idea, because economists know little of technology so they take this kind of shortcut approach, It's not like real world and what we should try is to model it more like real world.
He tried to give us a concept about innovation, and told us the difference between innovation and public goods. Innovations under no copy rights have something in common with public goods, but still they are quite different.
I was a little sleepy last evening and didn't catch up with him sometimes. Then he took Mozart for an innovation example.He recommended the movie Amadeus to us and said it's a good movie. In that movie, Mozart composed Figaro's wedding and simply gave the manuscript to the buyer in exchange for some money.The buyer owned the manuscript and then made copies and sold them. Mozart's composition is an innovational activity under no copy rights, but as long as he could get income larger than his costs, there is an incentive for him to do it, and then we get Mozart's heavenly music.
Quote: " Do you know Figaro? It's that 'ah~ah~ah~ah~~~~~'......not 'Figaro Figaro Figaro Figarofigarofigaro...' that's Rossini."
Ha~~what a musical professor. Someone told me he once danced to the cellphone ringing in his class.