Weekly Update from 6/18-6/24

This past week, I got the following done.

• Read more about market shock therapy

  • Learned more about the differences in applications between Poland and Russia

    • Poland rushed out reforms and then slowed it down after 2nd president of Poland was sworn in

    • Russia fell victim to undervaluation of companies which allowed "red directors" and oligarchs to buy out companies for cheap

    • Russia's voucher program to give 10k rubles or 2 Volga cars worth of money was flawed with a lack of identification and lack of information

      • Russian citizens would sell their vouchers to "investors" for reduced prices hoping to find lucrative returns, but were scammed

  • Shock therapy and the rate at which it's applied is contentious

  • The country and its economic makeup need to be thoroughly analyzed before applied

    • Russia had a lower GDP than the Czech Republic and Albania and had an economy dominated by heavy industry and arms and had small consumer goods and agriculture markets

    • USSR had archaic accounting methods which led to the undervaluation of companies

  • Mussa's proposition argues that if economic abnormalities are corrected swiftly, then market shock therapy should work

    • Lipsey-Lancaster Theory builds on that idea by saying that if those abnormalities are unable to be fixed, then it depends on the specific economy and no generalized solution exists

      • My take is that the Lipsey-Lancaster Theory is obvious and that Mussa's proposition can't be generalized as what is a "normal economy"?

      • Need to understand Mussa's proposition on a deeper level, so need to read that work

• Learned more about Neoclassical economics and different ways to model the economy

  • Learned more about Arrow's impossibility theorem which states that ordinal functions will behave incoherently and that cardinal functions that allow ranking in preferences are the only way to produce coherent results

    • Need to look through more of the proofs to work it out myself

    • Need to learn the economic notation of math

• Learned more Statistics and have gotten up to chapter 4 on statistics textbook

• Made little progress on machine learning

  • Did consolidate data for side project on economic development

  • Learned more about cleaning data and getting usable data from web scrapping with for loops and sys library from python
    

• Trying to find dummy variables that can be used for multiple regression that ideally will use savings, GDP, population, population that works in agriculture, and education

  • Need dummy variables for GDP, savings, education, population that works in agriculture due to OVB for all of those variables

• SAS is going decently enough, just need more practice on creating summary tables and using proc transpose

  • Finding practice clinical trial data is difficult and probably impossible without paying

  • Trying to make datasets that will have the same structure as those clinical sets

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For this next week, I need to dedicate more time for Machine Learning as well as SAS, but need to keep up the work on reading these economic papers. I need to read more economic papers and see how neoclassical economics is modeled as well as other heterodox schools. I feel as if the neoclassical need for objectivity is interesting considering the philosophic conditions it requires for the field to have rigorous findings.