Milton Friedman Econ 490 fall 2017

After reading the topic of this blog post and starting to read Chapter 5 of the textbook the team that immediately came to my mind was my high school baseball team my senior year.  I was relating the topics covered to the complexities of the baseball team.  The text then went on to use a baseball team as an example of how you do not need much teamwork to be successful, and how baseball allows you to be successful with many individuals that are good by themselves.  I find this to be a very simplistic view of baseball, and one that actually may be more true the higher you go in skill level.  For example, this is likely much more true to teams participating in the MLB, but I think it is much less true for teams at the high school level.  My high school in Chicago had class sizes of about 250 students per grade.  Also, it required testing to get into and was very selective, which in turn means that the students that enroll there do so not for sports, but rath...

During my internship over the summer I worked with three other interns in my specific department.  I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in their clearing house.  The CME is one of the largest derivatives exchanges in the world, and the clearing house takes a lot of the risk away from trading by matching trades and acting as the buyer to every seller and vice versa, ensuring that if one side can not fulfill the trade, then CME will fulfill the trade itself. Over the summer we worked in a department that would receive emails and phone calls from firms that needed our help for something, where we would either complete the task for them or hand them off to the department that would be able to help them as part of our daily operations.  Most of the help we did for them as interns had to do with testing how their systems worked with ours to ensure there were no problems.  We would do these tests individually, but we would also have projects throughout the summer w...

For three summers I worked as a camp counselor for a Chicago Park District. Although the organization of the entire park district is huge, I only worked for one small park, which itself worked as a smaller organization. The only connector between the parks and the organization was one person that would overlook all parks in a certain area. This manager would rarely visit our park and would visit just to ensure there were no major problems with the camp. Although there is little coordination between the park and the organization, the organization mainly cares that the campers have a safe summer, and the managers of the parks are able to strive for this without much need of further talk and coordination. There is however coordination between counselors and the managers at the park, although there is very little transaction cost from this. We all know are rolls and there are set themed days determined by the manager, and there is a schedule in advance that tells each group where they...

Milton Friedman is an extremely accomplished economist who lived from 1912 to 2006.  He was born in New York and earned a B.A. at the age of 20 from Rutgers University.  He then earned his M.A. from the University of Chicago and his Ph. D. from Colombia University.  In 1951 he received the John Bates Clark Medal for outstanding economic achievement under the age of 40.  He served as an advisor to President Richard Nixon and was the president of the American Economic Association in 1967.  He was also awarded the Nobel Prize for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and stabilization policy.  His research and views in monetary theory even impacted the Federal Reserves response to the global financial crisis of 2007-2008 after his death. In 1945 he wrote Income from Independent Professional Practice  along with Simon Kuznets.  In this book they argued that doctors were able to charge higher prices b...