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  (or 'what was it like in the olden days, Aidan?')

On new things, and old..

(Ecclesiastes Chapter 1):

1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

3 What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?

4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

5 The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

8 All things are full of labor; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

10 Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us.

11 There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

Some notes

• This is where I keep archived course materials. At present (October 2008), it mainly contains materials from 1998 to 2000, covering final year Irish Economy, second year Macroeconomics, introductory Mathematical Economics and final year undergraduate research projects.

  I'm posting this now mainly because some of the basic macro I used to teach is helpful to me, and I hope to students and others, in trying to make sense of the current slight unpleasantness in the global economy and in Ireland.

  I mean especially the emphases in the text I used to use:

  • Macroeconomics: a European Text (1997 edition on Amazon) by Michael Burda and Charles Wyplosz, OUP, Oxford.

  • 2009 edition on Amazon

  ...on..

  • real-monetary distinctions and linkages
  • stock-flow distinctions and consistency, and...
  • intertemporal budget constraints as linking both the above, as well as..
  • checking in with real-world data, and
  • not being afraid of a little math.

• On Slides:
  (De slidibus)
  

  There are a fair number of slides here, both in PowerPoint and pdf.

  • If you're (still) using a WindoZe machine, some of the images in the PowerPoint files may not appear properly; so try the pdf version, if it's there. Some of the slides (for the basic math econ course) I created using TeX running on a Mac. OzTeX was the main software implementation of TeX I used then.

  • I started using PowerPoint since I can't draw theory diagrams, or do basic maths with a steady hand in front of 300 people, however pleasant they are. Talking through that stuff; that, I can do.

  • The main virtue of PowerPoint or e-Slides generally (e.g., Keynote in Mac iWorks, the Beamer package for TeX people), in this particular context as I see it is to be able to show how the graphical treatment of theory concepts builds up in small steps, leading to a reasonably rich picture.

    Viewing the final theory graph only, is OK when you've been really keeping up or are just very smart, but for most of us, it helps to see the intermediate steps--- a few times. I didn't use full animation facilities when I created most of the slides here, since I began by using PowerPoint version 4, which didn't have a feature. (I rarely use software features that don't exist.)

    So many of the slides are constructed by this algorithm:

    • draw the final slide (perfectly),
    • duplicate,
    • delete one element from the duplicate and order it before the original,
    • repeat this loop until you get a blank slide.
    • have a cuppa tea.

    Then view the presentation---run it forward, and if you've deleted the elements in the right order (keeping them backwards in your mind, obviously), the build will work. This of course means a huge number of slide (like hand-drawn cartoons) but it was the best bet for me way back in the mid 1990s, given how crashy certain software was.

  • Many of the slide backgrounds are black: which looks great in a dark theatre (except where I have blue or red lines on black, which are helpfully invisible), but awful when printed. Thus the pdf versions of some slides, with black on white.

• In some cases, you'll undoubtedly find broken links, and re-directs. I'll try to fix these over time, but if they're especially annoying, feel free to email me.

• You may have got to this page because you were a student of mine in the past, you were doing your daily goolge or cuil of yourself, and your name is somewhere on these pages, perhaps even your undergraduate project is still here (I've taken down the archive of macro projects though). Let me know if you're OK with this. Or better still, link to your old student page and tell the young people about it.

• If you find the stuff here useful, please feel free to adopt and adapt it; I think of these as public goods, of whatever merit, and hardly 'mine' to begin with. In return, drop me an email and/or maybe link to this page from your own web page?

• A lot of the 2000 web pages I constructed by writing scripts in Perl, running them locally and posting up flat files. Some of the web project stuff relied on adapting others' Cgi scripts and running them off a little broken down Linux box running as an apache web server I used to have under my desk. Of course, evenually my server crashed. Life lesson: take some risks, play a bit, cherish your failures, but do keep a back-up :)

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