THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2012
PAGE 5
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAS
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opinion
FREE FOR ALL
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351
I think that if I had a class with basketball players I couldn't stop myself from throwing newspaper in the air when they walked in the room.
I feel bad for the guy whose shorts are higher than the girl's he is walking behind
It's lonely being a low income student at this university. Rich kids can never understand how hard it is. I wish there was a joke involved in all of this ...
Editor's note: Don't worry. Some-day, you'll make more money than all of them.
RAs ruin everything. What's wrong with having a betta fish fighting ring everything Thursday night?
Newt Gingrich can beat Obama ... in a pie eating contest. Editor's note: It would be more entertaining than most presidential debates.
Guy walks out of the rec, lights up a cigarette. Classic.
That annoying person from last semester? They were assigned as my lab partner.
The 99 percent suffer from jealousy. Like any of you would turn down a million dollar salary ...
Jeff Withey has a girlfriend? It's cool. I'll just pretend like I didn't hear that.
Just realized I sit in seat 69 in two of my lectures. It's gonna be a good semester!
Just heard the girl at the table next to me say she was going to watch Dora the Explorer to help her in Spanish class. #howareyoucollege.
Being an English major and liking Twilight is like being a music major and liking Nickelback, Rebecca Black and Insane Clown Posse.
Is it bad that my breakfast just consisted of five cinnamon rolls and two Dr. Pepper Cherrys?
Editor's note: You need some protein.
Fraser? Let's be real; I've written a paper waiting for the Summerfield elevator
Western Civ prof just dissed Tim Tebow! Day: made!
To the person complaining about being an English major. Come talk to us when you've been awake for more than 72 hours straight working on a project or if you spend 20 to 50 hours per paper while taking upper level math and physics courses. Sincerely, The Architectural Engineers. (Oh and yes we all still drink for a good
I say the next time a fan yells "home of the chiefs" during the national anthem, we FED EX them to the Mizzou student dorms.
It's pretty awesome to listen to a professor of a major liberal school bash the liberals! #polsclass
I live in Hash and shower daily.
I expect the university to offer me a scholarship for being a minority
totallyserious #showmethemoney
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wearing tennis shoes with jeans. How pretentious can you be?!
The European debt crisis made simple
INTERNATIONAL
I got randomly high-fived today by a stranger, coolest thing so far.
During the last several months, two separate media narratives have been playing out on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, the collective voice of the press has been focused on domestic issues and popular cultural absurdities such as the birth of Jay-Z and Beyonce's new baby, Blue Ivy Carter.
Meanwhile, the European media has been almost exclusively covering what has been called the greatest threat to Europe since 1945: the European Union Sovereign Debt Crisis. Even President Barack Obama has said that the European Union (EU) debt crisis is "the biggest headwind the American economy is facing right now." Despite this, it's fair to say that the majority of Americans do not understand the brewing economic crisis.
They should.
The crisis is the result of an ongoing attempt to unify the nations of Europe into a "United States of Europe" — a consolidated economic region able to compete with both the United States and China. Countries euro area are bound together in a monetary union, which means they share
All of this seems like a sensible attempt at international cooperation, but ignores one glaring fact: The nations of Europe have been waging war on another for the better part of the last 2000 years.
a common currency (the Euro) and a central bank (the European Central Bank).
Scars from this shared history cover the continent and factor into the economic, political and cultural realities of modern Europe. While nations are bound together by the decisions of a single central bank, each nation still controls its own budget and foreign policy. Most importantly, each clings to its national identity. As a result, a group of vastly different countries that tend to distrust one another have been forced into an intimate union. Put simply, it's the equivalent of forcing Kansas and Missouri to merge.
Normally, an independent country has several tools to prevent economic problems from occurring. These include using a combination of spending less money, asking others for help and printing more or less currency to support an alling economy.
However, the EU has married 17 countries with different fiscal and political regimes into a single monetary union. As a result, each EU nation has lost part of its ability to alleviate economic distress, because it cannot enact independent monetary policy. All 17 nations are now subject to the whims of the European Central Bank, which has been known to serve the needs of more powerful EU nations before those of the periphery.
European economic cooperation worked for a short time, but the 2008 global financial crisis reopened old wounds. Smaller EU economies (Greece, Ireland and Portugal) did not weather the crisis well and are now facing the prospect of a sovereign default (meaning that a country's debt is so large that it
no longer able to realistically pay it off). As a result, these weaker EU economies are asking the more powerful EU members, primarily Germany and France, for a bailout to avoid default. Understandably, these larger nations are hesitant to pay for the sins of their smaller neighbors.
A sovereign default has the potential to throw all of Europe and indeed the world into prolonged economic downturn.
If one of the troubled EU countries is allowed to default, any bank that holds a significant portion of that debt is also subject to fail. Because these large banks also happen to hold one another's debt, global banks could conceivably begin to fall like dominos if a single collapse occurred.
By definition, someone's debt is someone else's asset. Unfortunately for the global economic system, much of the bad debt in the EU is held by large multinational banks in Germany, France and the U.S.
The event would freeze global markets and bring about unprecedented economic calamity. This scenario is known as "financial contagion" because of its similarity
to the spread of an infectious disease in a global pandemic.
Given this unfortunate reality, it is important to understand that events happening halfway around the world can have a significant effect on our lives. The truth is, we no longer live in a world where all the solutions to our economic woes lie conveniently within our borders.
During the past several decades, the forces of globalization have made national economies and our lives more interdependent than ever before. At its core, this trend has been a powerful force for good, raising hundreds of millions around the world out of abject poverty and into a new global middle class.
However, it has also placed some uncomfortable pressure on developed countries, which have had their position of economic dominance for the past half-century challenged. As we continue the debate about how to heal our own economy, it would do us well to consider the global realities of our economic system.
Major EU countries public debt
Loving is a senior in chemical engineering and economics from McPherson.
Greece
Public debt: $374,758,904,110
Debt per capita: $34,103.09
Portugal
Portugal
Public debt: $174,502,465,753
Debt per capita: $16,402.76
Spam
Public debt: $804,698,630,137
Debt per capita: $17,539.14
Spain
France
Public debt: $2,003,150,958,904
Debt per capita: $31,882.18
France
Ireland
Public debt: $147,186,465,753
Debt per capita: $35,122.42
Germanv
Public debt: $2,315,786,575,342
Debt per canita: $27,931.98
HUMOR
To my future children
We didn't have iRain or iHubris when I was growing up. You kids have it easy since Apple learned to completely control Mother Nature. The winter of '12 was one of the toughest my generation of Kansans has ever endured. We had to trudge through sunlit days that got as cold as 40 degrees with wind-chill.
Little did we know, there was more than weather to dread. Like the descent of some primordial plague, the darkness of a storm descended over the soul of humanity. I know you kids will think your old man had been hittin' the bottle too hard again after you hear what he's going to tell you. On Jan. 18, we lost Wikipedia.
They say that when Google changed its logo to a black block, the moon turned to blood and cats and dogs began living together; mass hysteria, as predicted by the Mayans of old. Others say it was just overcast and slightly colder for a few days.
Only when you've escaped the darkness can you truly fear it, and not since I was a pre-teen, scouring the alcoves of my local library for information on Posh Spice (it was for a school report, I swear) have I felt so isolated and helpless. It was a desperate plea for help, but I didn't realize it at the time. There were shelves; endless shelves where ideas were not recycled, where research did not support the inane flight of mental fancy. Children, that the books wed been using for target practice would be pried open again was enough to send me back to that moment when my young tears had stained the wood of the archaic circulation desk.
For us college students, these were the darkest days since adults realized higher education could simultaneously be a money-making venture. With no Wikipedia, we had no way of accessing the esoteric yet
But I digress. Just like Pearl Harbor, the world changed indelibly for the worse, but unlike Pearl Harbor, this nightmare didn't star Ben Affleck. That was the digression.
diverting information we needed in a concise and meaningful format
We were in the darkest of dark ages, and it was only economical that we returned to our animalistic and base primordial instincts. We were forced to verbally communicate with one another. Only Facebook stood between us and our profoundly neglected, so-called, "real" lives. Can anyone blame us for what happened next? Sometimes chaos is the only logical option.
It was the dawn of the Great Depression. Unable to find a satisfactory answer to "what soap is made of" bored and with only my roommates for amusement, I drank myself to sleep that night.
When the bleak light of day broke my window the following morning, I sought to shield my eyes with a handy pillow. Upon discovering that the pillow was actually a live cat, I abandoned trying to return to the world of dreams and faced a world with information, once again, locked away in other parts of cyberspace.
And what did my wondering eyes behold when I opened my browser? There, glowing in effervescent light, with the radiance of paradise was the home page for Wikipedia. Against all odds, we had survived for 24 hours without it.
To ensure this catastrophe would never happen again, our generation unanimously voted for the Mandatory Information Act (M.I.A.), which is why Wikipedia is the only acceptable source of knowledge today.
Obermeier is a junior in history from Olathe.
SCIENCE
Avoiding impulsive behavior
Learning to recognize impulsive behavior may help us make better and more rational decisions in the future
How likely are you to wait a year to get the $10? If you'd choose to redeem it at any value less than $10, you're engaging in the same irrational thinking that psychologists detect in gamblers and drug addicts.
"Delay Discounting" describes a decision of choosing smaller, sooner rewards rather than larger, later ones, and it's often associated with being impulsive. When you discount a future reward you are essentially ignoring its value to choose the smaller sooner reward. This behavioral habit can give us clues as to how we make daily decisions, and in understanding how a gambler and a drug addict behave, we can better understand why we make impulsive decisions.
Suppose the Kansan offered a voucher to the bookstore in today's paper that is worth $5 for the next week. However, this voucher is special. The longer you save it, the more valuable it becomes so that it will be worth $10 in one year.
Frequently, gamblers go to the casino with hundreds and, many times, thousands of dollars. If they simply invested this money, they'd have much higher dividends in the long run. But gamblers don't invest; they gamble because they can win small amounts of money immediately. This behavior isn't much different from choosing to go out and drink with friends instead of study for a big test.
Drug addicts also discount their future heavily in that they alter the real value of the long term consequence. They devalue the long-term effects of drug usage to feel the immediate reward. Interestingly, research in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment tells us that drug users are more impulsive in general
than non-drug users.
Many people discount the real value of later rewards. Some say it is an evolutionary trait that came about as humans responded to immediate dangers as opposed future ones. Regardless, some good examples of discounting are smoking cigarettes, not caring about littering and spending money now instead of reaping
"In the end, we don't behave at random. There are patterns of how we make decisions, no matter how irrational the response may seem."
the rewards of saving it. We act impulsively by acting on the immediate reward and not the one that can come with self-control (getting a good grade on the test, living a longer healthier life, and being in a better financial situation). Many of these behaviors wouldn't even be looked at as impulsive. Deciding to watch television instead of taking out the overflowing trash is an example.
KU Assistant Professor of Applied Behavioral Science Dr. Derek Reed studies discounting and emphasizes it in his research. His research suggests we all engage in some form of discounting, and that it's predictable that a mathematical equation explains your degree of
The upside is that the predictable nature of discounting permits ways to behaviorally intervene to encourage self-control. Dr. Reed's Center for Applied Behavioral Economics is presently measuring how discounting explains college students' risk-seeking behaviors (including gambling), as well as the ways in which discounting underlies students' tendencies to be "green" on campus (recycling versus littering).
What Dr. Reed's and others' research suggests is that knowledge is power. One study in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Economics showed that with training, five pathological gamblers not only discounted future decisions less, but past decisions they made as well. We all discount some, because it is a common behavioral trait. But even knowing that such a term exists may serve to help you realize when you're being impulsive. Try to think about decisions you make on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and how you allocate your responses. What patterns or tendencies do you notice?
In the end we don't behave at random. There are patterns of how we make decisions, no matter how irrational the response may seem. While it may seem pessimistic to recognize that irrationality and impulsivity are common in most of our decisions, understanding the lawful nature of these behaviors increases our knowledge and begins starts the process of promoting self-control.
HOW TO SUBMIT A LETTER TO THE EDITOR
discounting, much like laws of physics determine momentum or gravity.
Softs is a senior in applied behavioral science from Pittsburgh, Penn.
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THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Members of the Kansas Edition Board are Ian Cummings,
Lisa Couran, Alexis Knoxet, Angela Hawkins, Ryan Schleshen and Matty Mathey.
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