Site Changes: Welcome to the Research Portal

Ever wondered what the infant mortality rate of Serbia in the in the 1970s was? Or Pepsi's bottom line? Or the production of coffee in Indonesia for the last few decades? These are all available if you know where to look...and the place to look is the no further than the new research portal which you can find on the right side of the home page. There's enough low-hanging fruit to keep your hunger for knowledge at bay for a lifetime.

The old "Links and Resources" section is now the "Research Portal" and contains a generous helping of links to databases of statistics for all your economic research needs. If there are any notable data sources missing, please comment a link to it and I'll check it out. Enjoy!

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Human Expansion

After a long stint of not posting anything, I wanted to share this flow chart that I made last night. (Click to expand!) Essentially I'm pulling from works by Amartya Sen and Dwight H. Perkins ("Development as Freedom" from the former and "Economics of Development" from the latter.)  My reasoning in creating this, besides to use as a study guide for an exam on economic development that is fast-approaching, was to make something that would help visualize the process of human development, which can admittedly be a somewhat vague concept to grasp. So the middle bubble is the main topic: defining what the flow chart is going to be about, and what development itself is: the expansion of freedoms people enjoy.  We say that societies are progressing when they create an environment wherein the inhabitants are better off, or freer, than they were in the past.  But again, this is a very nebulous concept to grasp and so  In the sub-bubbles are four sections to address: Removal of sources of unfreedom, creation of new freedom, economic growth, and political development. Far from what the structure of the chart might imply, these four categories do not progress in isolation of one another. It is simply an artifact of the program that I used to map this that there aren't a dozen relationship lines connecting various bubbles and sub-bubbles to each other. Most of the concepts are pretty straightforward or can be easily explained though a Google search. I will leave you with this though, a quote our professor gave and explained to the class. "Freedom is of a piece." When there is a tear in fabric, it very obviously hurts the effectiveness of the whole cloth.  Yet when the fabric is whole, it can function beautifully. The same can be said of the various forms of freedom.

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