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These lectures are from a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Academic Conference which was held at MIT in January 2006. The conference was in connection to the MIT course Special Topics in Supply Chain Management. This course is centered on how RFID systems will transform the business landscape, with a particular emphasis on the supply chain. The course will take an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the various aspects of a modern...more
Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform (PLSC 270) Professor Rae relates Marxist theories of monopoly capitalism to Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction. Both Marx and Schumpeter agree that capitalism is a system that is "incapable of standing still," and is always revising (or revolutionizing) itself. Professor Rae critiques Marxist determinism and other features of Marx's theories. To highlight Schumpeterian creative destruction,...more
Environmental Politics and Law (EVST 255) The lecture reviews water law in the United States, and highlights challenges inherent in regulating water quality. Aging water infrastructure, pesticide and herbicide application, and surface water runoff all pose challenges in maintaining a clean drinking water supply. The lecture covers pesticide management through the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). The management of pesticides and herbicid...more
Hunter-gatherer populations were much less dense than later agriculturalists. The variety of their food supply protected them from crop failures and their sparseness reduced the spread of infectious diseases. Hunter-gatherers were healthier and worked less than early agriculturalists. Why didn't their numbers increase up to the same level of Malthusian misery? Their numbers may have been limited by violence between groups. Agriculture is m...more
European populations grew only slowly during the period 1200-1700; factors include disease and wars. Human feces and rotting animal remains were not sequestered and often contaminated drinking water. Cities were so filthy that more people died in them than were born. About a third of children died in infancy, many from abandonment and lack of care during wet-nursing. Children that survived were subjected to harsh discipline to control thei...more
In order for Social Security to work, people have to believe there's some possibility that the world will last forever, so that each old generation will have a young generation to support it. The overlapping generations model, invented by Allais and Samuelson but here augmented with land, represents such a situation. Financial equilibrium can again be reduced to general equilibrium. At first glance it would seem that the model requires a s...more
In order to understand the precise predictions of the Leverage Cycle theory, in this last class we explicitly solve two mathematical examples of leverage cycles. We show how supply and demand determine leverage as well as the interest rate, and how impatience and volatility play crucial roles in setting the interest rate and the leverage. Mathematically, the model helps us identify the three key elements of a crisis. First, scary bad news ...more
Central Banks, originally created as bankers' banks, implement monetary policy using their leverage over the supply of money and credit standards. Since the Bank of England was founded in 1694, through the gold standard which lasted until the 1930s, and into modern times, central banks have pursued monetary policy to stabilize the banking system. Central banks monitor currency flows and inflation, acting when crises, such as bank runs, eme...more
This lecture explores how the mismatch between evolution and the current food environment has changed people's relationship to food. Ancient societies had a vastly different food environment compared to modern day societies, which was characterized by unpredictable food supply, the threat of starvation, and a high priority to bank energy. The human brain evolved for this ancient food environment, which creates challenges in the modern food...more
Model Predictive Control, Linear Time-Invariant Convex Optimal Control, Greedy Control, 'Solution' Via Dynamic Programming, Linear Quadratic Regulator, Finite Horizon Approximation, Cost Versus Horizon, Trajectories, Model Predictive Control (MPC), MPC Performance Versus Horizon, MPC Trajectories, Variations On MPC, Explicit MPC, MPC Problem Structure, Fast MPC, Supply Chain Management, Constraints And Objective, MPC And Optimal Trajectori...more
This lecture explains what an economic model is, and why it allows for counterfactual reasoning and often yields paradoxical conclusions. Typically, equilibrium is defined as the solution to a system of simultaneous equations. The most important economic model is that of supply and demand in one market, which was understood to some extent by the ancient Greeks and even by Shakespeare. That model accurately fits the experiment from the last...more
If the people who set the prices are the same people who set the production levels, then it's not really a market, and true supply and demand are a farce. David Rothkopf, author of Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making, says that Europe is leading the planet in green energy technology thanks to government subsidies, including biofuels and wind energy. Rothkopf is optimistic that the US will eventually adopt these...more
