The 007s — Week 4

Image Source: Fleabag

This week, I picked up Eckhart Tolle’s — A New Earth, re-watched Pheobe Waller-Bridge’s — Crashing for the 5th time, read white papers of several cryptocurrencies and revamped my Twitter. My learnings this week are heavily influenced by the world of Twitter.

• Population Pyramids: A population pyramid is a way to visualize two variables within a country’s population: age and sex. A population pyramid is a graph that shows the distribution of ages across a population divided down the centre between male and female members of the population. The graphic starts from youngest at the bottom to oldest at the top. It is called a population pyramid because when a population is growing (there are more babies being born than there are people dying), the graphic forms the shape of a triangle. Population pyramids are useful for studying the future of a region as well as examining historical and current population trends. If part of the population has been affected by sudden changes, such as casualties from armed conflict, high female mortality in childbirth, or the migration of young workers out of poorer regions, the graph will offer a way to visualize how the future population will be affected. They can also help direct government and private industry distribution of services for regions based on population needs.

• Game Theory: Pioneered by Mathematician John Nash in the 1950s, Game theory revolutionised how we people looked at the process of decision making in social interactions. To break it down: “Game” — refers to any interaction between multiple people in which each person’s payoff is affected by the decisions made by others. It primarily has two main branches:

a. Cooperative Games(where every player has agreed to work together toward a common goal). The key concept in cooperative games is the Shapley Value —which is a solution concept that involves fairly distributing both gains and costs to several actors working in a coalition.

b. Competitive/Non-Cooperative Games(which covers competitive social interactions that end in a few people winning or losing). The key concept in competitive game theory is the Nash equilibrium: a situation wherein one makes the choice that leaves them better off irrespective of what their opponents decide to do. Ever wondered why all competitor coffee shops, restaurants are built next to each other — it is because of the Nash Equilibrium. By being adjacent to each other, coffee shop competitors have equal access to customers coming from either side.

• Sticky Wage Theory: “Sticky” is a general economics term that can apply to any financial variable that is resistant to change. The sticky wage theory hypothesizes that employee pay tends to respond slowly to changes in company performance or to the economy. According to the theory, when unemployment rises, the wages of those workers that remain employed tend to stay the same or grow at a slower rate rather than falling with the decrease in demand for labour. Specifically, wages are often said to be sticky-down, meaning that they can move up easily but move down only with difficulty. The theory is attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes, who called the phenomenon “nominal rigidity” of wages.

• OECD: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organisation that works to build better policies for better lives. Their goal is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all. It was started in 1948, after World War II, to run the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. Its goal was to help European governments recognize their economic interdependence. In this way, it was one of the roots of the European Union. In order to become a member, a nation must be reviewed by different member committees. It must be willing to reform its economy to meet standards in different areas, like corporate governance, anti-corruption, and environmental protection. There are currently 38 member countries that make up the OECD.

Source: OECD website

• The Poverty Trap: We have always wondered why people are poor and talk about poverty as a vicious cycle — as if possessed by some supernormal powers. A poverty trap is a mechanism that makes it very difficult for people to escape poverty. A poverty trap is created when an economic system requires a significant amount of capital in order to earn enough to escape poverty. Many factors contribute to creating a poverty trap, including limited access to credit and capital markets, extreme environmental degradation (which depletes agricultural production potential), corrupt governance, capital flight, poor education systems, disease ecology, lack of public health care, war, and poor infrastructure.

• Orwellian: Named after Eric Blair (alias George Orwell), the term Orwellian is thrown around frivolously while talking about oppressive regimes all around the world. Inspired by the writer’s classic 1984, Orwellian has come to become a synonym of ‘oppressive”. As a writer, Orwell used doublespeak (Doublespeak is a language that deliberately distorts the meaning of words. e.g., “downsizing” for layoffs and “servicing the target” for the bombing, in which case it is primarily meant to make the truth sound more palatable). The deceptive use of language, creating a dependence on the state definitions is what truly constitutes as ‘Orwellian’ — reducing this word meaning to the authoritarian regime is exactly what George Orwell criticised in his writings.
• Zen Koans: A kōan is a story, dialogue, question, or statement which is used in Zen practice to provoke the “great doubt” and to practise or test a student’s progress in Zen. They are succinct paradoxical statements or questions used as a meditation discipline for novices, particularly in the Rinzai sect. The effort to “solve” a koan is intended to exhaust the analytic intellect and the egoistic will, readying the mind to entertain an appropriate response on the intuitive level. A Zen master gives koans to his or her followers, and they are expected to dedicate themselves to concentrating on these ideas and finding answers.