My Open Inquiry

In classical music, there may be no opening chord so famous as Richard Wagner's opening few moments to his opera Triston und Isolde. The opera is a behemoth--lasting nearly four hours, and is a beast of a performance for any opera company to put on. Luckily, the famous prelude, clocking in at no more than ten minutes, is much more digestible. That is what we will be enjoying together today. First, some context on the opera. Wagner took great influence from the philosophies of Arthur Schopenhauer, a nineteenth-century German philosopher, though they never met. Schopenhauer's philosophy was nothing if not pessimistic---He saw life as driven by an insatiable, irrational force, the Will, which leads to perpetual suffering. As Schopenhauer saw it, this suffering will never be realeased---until death. Wagner's narrative takes us through every stage of this idea---despair, passion, and finally, release upon death. We start off with the prelude to the entire act, when we are ...

In economics, the minimum wage is a very tricky question.  Indeed, it's one of the biggest questions right now where many economists vehemently disagree. And with its enormous political and social implications, this is a question that needs to be answered more than ever. At face value, the effects of a minimum wage are simple. Any introductory Micro class will teach that price floors---in this case, a minimum wage that restricts wages to above a certain price point---will simply lower the quantity demanded of labor and create unemployment for unskilled workers, hurting the very people the minimum wage is intended to help. In other words, let's say unskilled labor is only worth, for example, 10$/hour, but the government raises minimum wages to 20$. Then, businesses will start realizing, “We're already paying 20$, so what’s the point in keeping the unskilled labor? Let’s fire them all and bring in skilled ones, people actually worth the 20$”. This drives unemployment among th...

Musical history is notoriously difficult to preserve. While literature can be translated and sculptures and monuments viewed millennia after its creation, the music of our ancestors exists only in fleeting echoes, impossible to be preserved. Without a system to record sound, we know well of the musical traditions of Ancient Greece or Rome, but the melodies are all but lost to time. The documented history of European classical music begins in the 14th century, when European priests developed musical notation, finally providing a way to transcribe sound. This breakthrough is where we begin our discussion of early music.  Medieval Beginnings Medieval music (500 - 1400) was shaped by composers like Hildegard von Bingen and Pérotin , who expanded plainchant—melodies sung by a single voice without instrumental accompaniment—into early polyphony, where multiple independent melodic lines were sung simultaneously. A well-known example is Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes, which demonstrates how sim...

Economics is a study of decision-making. For you and I, decision-making is simple: Which movie should I watch? Should I buy a new toaster or a new book? For governments, though, the question is much more complicated: How should the government step in during Recessions? How should we address the rising costs of education without increasing public debt? The question of how government should intervene to right economic failures is ubiquitous in Macroeconomics.  Too many times, however, these questions presuppose that government acts as a benevolent entity working for the public good. It's easy to point to a failure in the economy and conclude, "The government should fix this." However, unlike traditional economic theory, Public Choice Economics views government more realistically, as just another economic agent working towards their own selfish interests. Public Choice theory studies not what government should  do, as is the case in so many other subfields, but what governme...

Inequality is on the rise. In America, the top 0.1%’s share of wealth has risen from 7% in 1978 to 22% in 2012, [1], and the top 1%’s share of after-tax income rose from 9% in 1960 to 15% in 2019[2]. Mean while, the share of income of the bottom 90% has steadily declined. Yet, the issue of inequality is incredibly divisive among economists. This article explores two distinct perspectives held by economists regarding the significance of inequality and the actions that should be taken to address it. Some, like French economist Thomas Piketty, sound the alarm over the escalating income and wealth inequality in America. Piketty shows in his 2013 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century that wealth inequality allows firms to use accumulated wealth to engage in rent-seeking for personal benefit. Common examples of rent-seeking include monopolies or regulatory capture — firms or individuals wielding political connections to benefit themselves. The OECD furthers find that inequality has redu...

Introduction The 1970s were a decade of upheaval—not just socially and politically, but economically as well. The global economy was rocked by a phenomenon that economists of the time believed to be impossible: stagflation. For years, prevailing economic theories insisted that inflation and unemployment had an inverse relationship—a tradeoff neatly illustrated by the Phillips Curve. Yet the 1970s delivered a rude awakening: surging inflation and rising unemployment occurring simultaneously. This period of economic chaos it shattered the intellectual foundation of mainstream economics and ushered in a new era of thought incorporating Monetarist ideas. The failure of traditional tools to address this paradox forced economists to reconsider their understanding of inflation, unemployment, and monetary policy. At the center of this revolution stood figures like Milton Friedman, whose theories of inflation expectations and the natural rate of unemployment not only explained stagflation but a...