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More About Me

I'm passionate about

Social institution,social evolution and raise of altruism and cooperation and the possible impacts from modern institution.

An idea worth spreading

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful it would not be worth knowing, and life would not be worth living. --Henri Poincaré(1908)

Talk to me about

the study of economic and the unexpected impact on society.

Comments

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• A comment on Conversation: Should economics be a mandatory class since elementary school?

  Dec 18 2011: I think that it is economy, rather than economics the key logic that shapes our society, affects our living standards and reshapes our connection with other people. It's true that anyone without a clear idea on how the economy runs might be confused hindered and even be manipulated.
  If you look closely, economic is more a deductive discipline other than a inductive science. It is not that clear whether the kinds will understand the economy by learning economics. However, there're many easy-to-deal assumptions which have terrible ethic implication.
  We shall know that although Adams Smiths advocates labor diversion (a kind of cooperation) in the Wealth of Nations, the mainstream economics focuses much more on the "fantastic insight": selfish egoists are directed by the "invisible hand" and can achieve social optima by follow the voice of their greed.
  Nowadays most of the traditional models we can see are derived from the dismal assumptions like: everyone concerns only about their self-interest and working causes dis-utility. It is true that more and more economist turn their focus on human side, they are introducing trust, altruism and cooperation in their works. Yet, as there is a great inertia and those new models are much more complex, many are too complex to have any definition result, the assumption that man are selfish is in the mainstream.
  Although Friedman argues that assumption does not matter, if it delivers a right result, yet, I am not that sure, whether teaching economics in elementary level will cause ethic problems.
  There is very interesting paper to share with you: "Do Economists Make Bad Citizens" in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1996.