[MSJ] - Day 7: First Homework Assigned!

Second blog for today, but this time its "live". Now in the last post, I explained why I didn't put up a blog last night, but I never explained how I solved my problem or how I'm writing right now. So to pick up where I dropped off last post, after finding out that I couldn't use my computer, I sent an email to Don letting him know that I couldn't post my blog and might have a more serious problem at hand. He recommended that the next day I try to find and use someone else's charger, to see if the problem was my computer or my charger. Fast forward to this morning, in a final last ditch effort I tried using my charger again, and this time for some magical reason it worked, and my computer started charging. I was instantly relieved because I had started to think about the worst case scenario and having to buy a new laptop while here.

After averting disaster, I sent an email to Don to let him know that the problem was fixed for the moment, and then went about my morning. Today in class we had a guest lecturer called Claire, who had done research with my professor and John List, the chair of the department of economics at UChicago. She gave a presentation about why even if researchers conduct an experiment that can lead to a causal statement when the program is implemented city, state or even nationwide its results can be different. This is due to problems in scaling. One issue is that it is easier for the researcher to implement a particular program on a small scale because they can ensure the quality of the program. For example, if the experiment had to do with the effect of different teaching styles, the researcher could ensure that teachers were following the curriculums being tested, whereas if this program were to be implemented on a larger scale, there would be less control on how the teachers stuck to the curriculum, and the results would be different.

Ethan gets a full selfie this time

In the afternoon one of the TAs, Ivan, led a lecture then a discussion segment about yesterday's reading. The reading explored what was responsible for the gender wage gap, and more specifically if the gender wage gap was caused by a difference in competitiveness between men and women, and if women were less competitive by nature or because of social pressure/norms. Their experiments across a range of situations and platforms concluded that women in western and patriarchal societies are significantly less competitive than men in the same environments. However, experiments they conducted in a matriarchal tribe in India showed in that in the right environment, women could be more competitive than men, indicating that even if social norms aren't the only reason, they are at least a big one.

After a long day of a lot of thinking, I went back to the dorms to start writing two blogs and complete the readings. Aside from these more standard tasks, today was also the day that our first homework assignment was given out. For Monday, we have to as a group solve a series of problems dealing with different economic principles we are learning about in class.