Weekly Update from 6/25-7/1

This week, I got the following done.

Learned more about development and about economies like Ethiopia and South Korea

• Something that's been nagging at me is the idea that development models like South Korea aren't as easily replicable in the modern context and might have environmental ramifications

• How would Ethiopia develop? Some have pointed towards their growth as nonindustrial development and claim that there might be a different way of growth, but Ethiopia is still deeply invested in industrializing with their industrial plants

  • On top of that, their development traces to their investments in infrastructure, which will inevitably give lesser and lesser returns as time goes on due to the decrease of marginal productivity

  • Can Ethiopia compete with countries like Bangladesh and develop at a speed similar to South Korea? How can countries like Ethiopia focus on export oriented industrialization and come away with firms that are strong enough to compete with other nations?

    • My doubt here is informed by the Korean economic crisis in 1997, as a large part of South Korean firms couldn't handle the liberalization and went bankrupt, and with 30% of the top 30 chaebols not being able to afford the principal of their loans and only being able to go forward due to bank extending their loans

  • I've spent the majority of my time reading books on the Asian Crisis in 1997-98, banking in Latin America, and other various economic experiments. On economic experiments, I'm still working through Bannerjee's Poor Economics.

• Practiced more SAS, making good progress on making the tables itself, just need to get better at consolidating different tables into one big table

  • I'm still looking for clinical tables to replicate, which is hampering my progress.

• I didn't make much progress on Python and machine learning, I need to dedicate more time and effort to making personal projects so that I can properly learn.

• Need to dedicate more time on statistics and need to get back to learning more linear algebra and differential equations. Need differential equations to be able to model better.

My goals for the next week are as follows:

• Get through 1-2 chapters on the statistics textbook as well as linear algebra and differential equations

• Read more about development economics and get a better handle on their methodology

• Get back into reading more about Shock Therapy, but this is secondary to development reading as I'm learning more and more about the process of liberalization

• Do pet projects in Python for ML and general Python

• Continue practicing more SAS