I find it interesting that as smoothly as the TPP went for lawmakers and corporate interests the TTIP agreement with the EU is decidedly less friendly. Is it that the popular sentiment means more in Europe than it does in the US or is it that the lawmakers are just less corrupt? I feel that in many ways EU countries seen the protest that went on in the US as well as locally and decided to take a deeper look into the agreement negotiated than US politicians did. Though with the rhetoric that is coming out of Germany and France of late one would think that it was a raw deal.

After finding an article on Reddit about Russia trying to increase it’s influence in Siberia by giving away free land (2.5 acres a person). Although this appears like a modern day land grab similar to what the United States did in the 1800’s 90,000 Chinese already live in the area. Are the Russians really that afraid of their Chinese neighbors annexing swathes of Siberia in a similar manner to what t is doing in the china sea?

Looking back on the semester, crazy that it is already over, to me it was one of surprises. Before this course when I thought of economics I would think of the two sides of Communism and Capitalism thinking only in terms of absolutism; ie. one had a Capitalist country or a Communist one. I now understand just how much I don’t understand about the shades of grey that make up the economic systems of the world. I found your look at the present both depressing in that the gap between “rich” and “poor” only seems to be growing, and yet uplifting in that the wage gap between the sexes is slowly shrinking, even if it does not come fast enough.

I enjoyed the format of the class where students were bringing posts to the blog about not only what was going on in the world, but events that were relative to the unit that we were in. I also thought that the relative aspect of the due dates was an interesting shift from the hard deadlines one normally finds in education. I thought the book report was not as helpful as it could have been because essentially everyone was doing their own thing with no interaction between us unlike with the posts everyone was making.

I would say my 3 best posts are:
Basic Income: Where I used other articles to support a position that everyone should have a basic income.
Election Cycle: Where my post sparked a discussion on what it really means to be a service based economy and how government policies affect this.
Shifting Economies of a Digital age: My thoughts about where patents and copyrighted information is headed with the change in how information is spread.

The world today is vastly different from the world of even 50 years ago. We talk as economists about concepts that really only apply to things which hold a physical medium. The coming of the Digital Age forces us as a society to rethink how something is profitable. At the onset of the Digital Era people questioned what it means to “own” something, what does it mean for them to own a copy of a CD if it is not unique? The answer economists provided was that whoever makes a product is entitled to distribute it however they so desire. Now, if what is produced is a physical object, I agree with this for by selling that product the producer is denying themselves the use, but if what is being sold is intangible, than what is sold should not be owned by any one group or person. In the example of CD’s what is being sold is not the physical medium of the CD, but the knowledge contained on said CD.

The entertainment industry struggles with this as a whole as when they create new ways of saying things people copy the knowledge bypassing the need for a physical medium all together. The entertainment industry business model though is based in a material society instead of a digital one. Instead of forcing everyone to pay before watching, because it is almost impossible to prevent the spread of information, the Entertainment Industry should instead make money based on the amount of people at a given time watching a given piece of knowledge. As Netflix grew it was found that the amount of people “pirating” movies decreased, this is because people were no longer being barred from access, but instead being asked to pay for access to the information. Now that Netflix has gone global the Entertainment Industry is now trying to region lock information once more, and Netflix is going along with it. I expect to see an increase in “piracy” in the coming months because the walls around knowledge will not last.