What I’ve learned this semester is that there is a departure from economics of the last century, including terms like third world countries, to new concepts like calculating happiness as a measurement for success. While I view this with both encouragement I also share a degree of skepticism that I want to take a minute to explain why. In this class, we’ve looked at several macro-picture topics such as the bottom billion. I see economics in terms of this, globalized business down to the local guy, but while I am optimistic that measuring happiness will open new doors for discovery I feel it is diverting attention away from production. I am a production person. I was raised that way and that’s how I approached business. What bothers me about exploring concepts such as happiness is the effect it will have on production. To me, production means being able to put food on the table. Its a trade-off. Time for money. That may be old school, but I certainly sleep better at night knowing everyone in a company is onboard, committed and willing to go that extra mile. I’ve grown companies by leaps and bounds, by millions of dollars, but did so with the help and recognition of the team, not just one person getting all the credit. I see happiness as too subjective, too influenced. I’ve seen employees give up their happiness, their hopes and dreams, whether that’s putting a kid through college or taking a cruise in the Bahamas, just to please someone’s happiness… and doing so by coercion, not willingly! Happiness is a wonderful thing, and the Declaration of Independence speaks of the pursuit of it, but unfortunately that’s all it is, a pursuit. Measuring happiness against hopefulness therefore is basically an illusion.

when it comes to a reflection on the class I would say that the class is rather well designed. My only real problem with the class are those that I find in all online classes in that though I don’t like making blog posts. I generally find that with the lack of constant feedback also caused me suffering, seeing as a majority of what I’d posted about was via replies and comments on the videos linked. Posts like those are not internally treated as posts; hence when I have no method of knowing whether or not they were counted when it comes to point totals. I only bring this up because when I went to check my grade online, it appeared as if I had only been credited for the main posts. however the relaxed deadlines were also quite helpful because the lack of consistent real-world contact with you and the other students would sometimes end up putting them in the back of my mind. overall I would call it quite an enjoyable class though the nature of doing the blog posts allowed me to have discussions with the other students on points we don’t agree on a skill that in economics is fundamental, and at the end of the day it allowed me to be more honest about my opinions through leaving me unafraid of the long-term relationship affects with other students (no offense towards them, it even helped me to respect them more when they didn’t agree). If I were to rate it I would probably give the class as a whole a 3.5 GPA

Reflecting back, one thing I learned in this class is something about myself. I have always been the “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” type of person. I tend to stick to routine, so when I discovered that this was not your routine class, it freaked me out. When it was mentioned that it’s similar to Facebook, it freaked me out even more. I’m not a very public person and don’t delve into social media all that much. I was timid to learn that my blog post’s can be seen by the public. So what I discovered, is that even though it was a challenge for me I was able to learn in a non traditional way. I feel like I learned a lot about economics, that I didn’t know, in a way that had I not taken this class I could have learned at home. It was hard to break the routine of non-traditional learning, but I figured it out somewhat. While it’s still a struggle for me to express my opinion behind a keyboard, I felt I did an okay job. Prior to taking this class, I often thought of economics, and economy more on the financial side of the government. I learned that economics is so much more than just money. I learned how economics relates to the environment, and the people living in that environment. How a poor environment can effect economics. Overall I enjoyed the knowledge I gained.

I think my best post’s are the ones written about poverty. Mainly because I’m knowledge about it. I see it daily and I feel like I’m seeing it from a side that few have seen. I can offer a perspective about their living situations that you can’t get from statistics and numbers. I’ve never been very good at getting my thoughts on paper, so they may not have weighed into that much detail but I like to think it offered a little more than what we read. I also think my post about the Affordable Care Act was pretty good, again because I have a lot of knowledge in it. I think the ACA is a good idea, but don’t agree particularly with everything about the law. I feel like we as American’s are already spending way to much on health care.

After doing all of the readings I generally feel nervous towards the future, because most of these problems would be solved if people were to do simple things. for instance we could drastically reduce our carbon emissions by a significant number if we didn’t have a culture that believed in the necessity of owning your own vehicle. but in actuality our biggest problem that affects all of our generations is the amount of excess in our recent ones we drive everywhere we demand low costs of food to the detriment of it’s quality. The greedy nature of life is not only it’s greatest triumph but could very well be it’s inevitable demise. I don’t believe anyone really thinks global warming is a hoax, just that they refuse to accept what that responsibility means for humanity as a whole.