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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Lloyd who wrote (16592)	3/8/2002 8:02:51 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Re: the data. The post you responded to discussed how, according to work done by Mitchell and Burns at NBER (Burns was Greenspan's mentor at Columbia and became Fed chairman himself) the cycles DON'T usually move together. Also, yesterday I posted something from ECRI about asynchronous business cycles. Message 17168506 The people at NBER and ECRI do understand calculus, and statistics. Maybe if I'd started on this 30 years ago, I'd have a shot at doing it myself. My economics teacher suggested I give the econometrics class this summer a try, but I think it's really too advanced. But when I get a bit more time I am going to start brushing up on algebra, and see how far I can get. My younger son will be taking Algebra II next, maybe he can tutor me, or maybe the older one will spare me a few moments away from his beloved games. I did make a 701 on the math part of the SAT, I understand the concepts, it's just numbers that are hard. But I was in high school before calculators were invented. Took the SAT before calculators were invented, too. So no idea how I'd do now. Worse, probably. My husband, who aced every calculus class he ever took, only scored around 650 on the math SAT. He's younger than me. I think he used a slide rule in high school, but a calculator in college. I bought a calculator, finally, I think in 1973. It cost $125 and I think it did have more than four functions, but I really can't remember. I was making $5 an hour then but minimum wage was $1.25, so it cost a hundred hours work before tax for an entry level worker like most college students - as Mq says, close to a month's salary. My aunt put cute transparent pink and purple four function calculators in the kids' stockings for Christmas - $1 at WalMart. Not my kids. My boys use heavy duty scientific calculators with functions I've never heard of. Actually, I think I might be able to understand calculus if it was taught to me by someone who understood its applications. Math people don't care what math is for. I have a hard time getting it unless I am trying to solve a real problem. But I can see how it would help in economics. You have to be able to show not only change but the rate of change. I remain skeptical that math can show cause and effect. P.S. Going back to college at 49 is not an indignity. It's fun.