Headline August06, 2014

''' THE CASE FOR THE STUDENTS 

MICRO-FINA​NCE BANK ''''

The great Polish poet Cselaw Milosz comes to mind and I quote just one verse from- :  '' An Ecstatic Pessimist ''/

' when will that shore appear from which at last we see,

 How all that comes to pass and for what reason........'

I dedicate this above verse to the President of the United States of America  : Barrack H Obama. 

The world students, better still, the Students of the World, have mesmerised leaders  -and the world-  as they set out to be effective, heard and recognised. It is but a humble beginning, with  planned,  students global elections in 2015 to !WOW!.

What remains for the  ''developing world''  students, are the daily challenges of survival, -occasionally they give rise to frenzied battles and thus the responsibility of dealing with them.

O''  Students, No one in the world has faced an agenda of comparable scope. This is no hyperbole. It is the hand fate has dealt you,  -the present generation. 

The best Nationalism is enlightened Internationalism and,  so, we have to operate coherently and effectively in the best interest of common success.

TIME to get off square-3 of the  Ecosystem-2011.

FOR THE WORLD,  just as well for the economists,   2008  was a terrible, terrible nightmare.

The people who observe, feel, and suffer, -as George Bernard Shah puts it : 'Hopelessly helpless, and Helplessly hopeless'-

And so it did apply to the people who teach, and research the discipline mocked by Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century polemicist, as  ''the dismal science'', not only failed to spot the precipice-

'Many forecast exactly the opposite!!!'   -a tranquil stability they called, they called the  ''great moderation''. While the global economy is still healing, somewhat,  - the subject is still in a state of flux,??

With students eager to learn what went wrong, but find themselves terrible frustrated by what they are taught. Some hold new projects to return economics aim to change this.

Britain has form here. In the early 1930s economics was in a terrible state. The global economy was stuck in a rut; and economists could not explain why. Two Britons changed things.

In  1933, John Maynard Keynes, an economist at Cambridge University, supplied the raw ingredients : a new theory that explained how deficient demand could lead to persistent recessions and long-term unemployment. The ideas were radical but technical.

They really took off when John Hicks, then also at Cambridge, distilled Keynes' ideas into a simple model which quickly became the backbone of undergraduate teaching.

Now that the condition for change are ripe again, Britain is well placed to take a lead. For a start there is fresh blood coming into the subject. The numbers taking economics  A-level  -over 26,000 in June 2013-  are at an all time high.

Many university students, however, are disappointed by what follows. At Manchester University, a  student society  has been set up to challenge the current syllabus.

Among the demands are fewer lectures bogged down in detailed maths, and more time discussing important historical thinkers.

This is not just student grumbling. Many tutors bemoans the fact that the history of economic thought is now rarely taught. This does not mean a shift left to Karl Marx's communism or right to Friedrich Hayek's libertarianism, but equipping students with the tools to use historical thinkers as a source of new ideas.

To see why this matters, take banking. Irving Fisher and Milton Friedman were both sceptical of fractional reserve banking  (the fact that bank deposits are turned into loans, not safe assets)  and wrote about it extensively.

For the few who knew about them, their proposals were helpful in designing the  ''ring-fence''  being used to protect retail deposits today.

If more regulators had been taught about their work at university perhaps the idea would have come before the crash, rather than after it.

It is not just students who are dissatisfied with economics.

Professional economists and !WOW!  can spot easy wins too. Many think economic history should be more widely taught, citing the fact that Ben Bernanke's Federal Reserve-

At the time, influenced by his knowledge of the Great Depression and of Japan's slump in the  1990s, outperformed rich world peers. 

The Honour and Serving of the Post continues. Thank you for reading. And don't miss the next one.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the United States of America. See Ya all  on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' The World's New Heirs : Students '''

Good night and God bless!

SAM Daily Times - The Voice of the Voiceless