Tag: games

Say It Ain’t So, Fed, Say It Ain’t So

The Federal Reserve broke my heart recently.

Now you might think that today’s post is about something to do with monetary policy, or the taper, or something high falutin’ like that.

Nope. It’s about a game. The Fed Chairman game, to be specific. And I’m heartbroken because the Federal Reserve took it down:

Thank you for your interest in the monetary policy game, Chair the Fed. The game has been a useful and fun tool to learn more about monetary policy. However, the Fed has updated its approach to monetary policy, and the changes are not readily accommodated within the existing structure of the game. As of June 1, 2021, the game is no longer available.
You can learn more about the Fed’s policy updates here. Be sure to also check out FOMC Rewind, a texting video series that summarizes the FOMC’s meeting statements.
In the meantime, we encourage you to connect with us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

https://www.sffed-education.org/chairthefed/default

So what was the game all about? Well, you got the chance to “be” the Fed Chairperson for sixteen quarters, or four years. You had to “react” to events that took place in the economy by raising or lowering interest rates, in order to meet two objectives. First, you had to make sure that inflation was as close to possible to 2% over the duration of your term, and second, you had to make sure that unemployment was as close as possible to 5% over the duration of your term.

The game was designed with some sort of a payoff between inflation and unemployment, and the reason I use the phrase “some sort of” is because I do not know quite what the functional form was. If you played the game long enough, you figured out pretty quickly that there would be a “crisis” at the end of your fourth quarter in charge. And the remaining 12 quarters were essentially an exercise in firefighting.

Inflation in the game had a way of getting out of hand pretty quickly, and unless you were quick enough to react and adjust real interest rates quickly enough, each successive quarter would have the economy spiraling quickly out of control. Of course, if you knew your monetary theory well enough you could figure out how to “win”.

Here’s a screenshot of the game layout:

Source: The Hill

And here’s an example of how quickly things could get out of hand:

Sourcehttps://i.ytimg.com/vi/5PAJtUjikis/maxresdefault.jpg

The last sentence from the previous version bears repetition: Of course, if you knew your monetary theory well enough you could figure out how to “win”.

That’s the point!

And that’s why I wish the Fed would reinstate the game. Because playing the game was a great way to get students to learn what monetary policy looks like in action. Sure, you can have students read Mishkin, or any other monetary text. And sure you can have them go through as many PDF’s released by both the Federal Reserve and the RBI. But nothing beats having the class split up into two teams, and playing three rounds each of this game.

After that, explaining the monetary transmission mechanism, or the Philips curve, or inflation expectations, or what “dovish/hawkish” means was child’s play. Because you see, they’d seen the effects for themselves.

So, dear whoever-is-in-charge-of-this-at-the-Federal-Reserve, I completely agree with you when you say that “the Fed has updated its approach to monetary policy, and the changes are not readily accommodated within the existing structure of the game”. No game could (or should) have envisioned the last eighteen months, and its ramifications on monetary policy.

But the game still served as such a magnificent jumping-off point for discussions about what transpired in the last eighteen months. “So now you’ve understood how monetary policy works under usual circumstances and most crises”, you could say at the end of the session. “But what about what the world went through in the last eighteen months? Would these tools be enough? Why or why not? What other tools does the Fed have in its arsenal? Which are most appropriate to use under these circumstances? Why?”

My point is that it was, and it still remains, a great way to introduce the subject to anybody, and especially those of us who’re learning about monetary policy for the first time. And there’s, in my case, about twelve years of students who I subjected to this game – and I’m pretty sure they would all agree with the request I’m about to make.

Please, dear ol’ Federal Reserve. Pretty please, with a cherry on top. Please bring the game back. It’s a great teaching tool, and classrooms are more boring without it.

Etc: Links for 3rd Jan, 2020

  1. Tim Harford sings praises of gaming:
    “But for most gamers the point of games is that they are enjoyable in a deeper way than most mere entertainments. They create moments of enchantment to rival the finest music or theatre. A good game has you solving puzzles, throwing yourself into improvised acting, and then helpless with tears of laughter. The friendships I’ve forged over the gaming table have been the ones that have lasted.”
    ..
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  2. On living in a commune in San Francisco. Beer isn’t welcome anymore, apparently.
    “I made my first mistake early on. It came at one of the dinner parties, which tended to happen spontaneously: one person would sit down quietly to eat a stir fry, before others joined them with takeout or leftovers. I brought a case of beer, which seemed to offend the zest for self-improvement that defined the commune. Sleep, and getting enough of it, was the topic du jour. Entire dinners were spent discussing the finer points of sleep tracking, which monitoring gadgets worked best (the Oura Ring was popular); how best to optimise a bedtime schedule; what to eat; what not to drink. I felt like a Neanderthal, supping beer and interjecting to add that surely it was important to enjoy yourself now and again. This sat oddly with a group that was on a different path towards self-actualisation. Alcohol disrupts sleep, it turns out.”
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  3. A fascinating article on… feathers.
    “Feather stuffing, once the height of luxury, has become ubiquitous. Over the past quarter-century, our global demand for warmth – even on a short shopping trip – has led to a tripling of the global trade in feathers by volume. Never mind being light as a feather, the raw plumage that drifts across borders each year is equal to the weight of nearly 90,000 cars. And 80% of those feathers come from one country: China.The trade in feathers is not a simple case of supply meeting demand. The down in our coats is, in fact, a by-product of the ducks and geese that end up on dinner tables. In terms of price per weight, down feathers – the soft, fuzzy ones on the bird’s breast – are the most valuable part of a duck, worth $25-50 per kg, roughly ten times as much as the meat. But a typical bird yields some 2.5kg of meat compared with just 15 grams of down, so a duck’s value lies mostly in its flesh. The soft feathers account for just 3% of its value, so abattoirs see those fluffy hairs not as a treasured commodity but detritus.”
    ..
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  4. Curbed chooses bike sharing as the biggest thing to have happened in the previous decade.
    “Studies have shown that bike share can help boost some transit ridership and may even be safer than riding personal bikes. The average cyclist death rate is 21 deaths per 100 million trips, but through 2014, after seven years of bike share in U.S. cities and 23 million rides, not a single person had been killed riding a bike-share bike. By the time U.S. bike share rides hit 100 million, which happened sometime in early 2017, only one death had been reported.”
    ..
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  5. On simplifying quadratic equations.

Etc: Links for August 2nd, 2019

Links to five games that you can play on your smartphone. Yes, timepass, but also, teach you to think differently, or better (or both!). Some of these you have to pay for – I have purchased and played all of them, and have found them useful.

  1. Monument Valley. (1 and 2)
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    Beautifully designed, haunting music, and for a person like me, who struggles with three dimensional visualization, this game was a literal eye-opener.
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  2. Threes!
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    The free copycat version became much more popular, but this game is rather more challenging, well designed, with better music and sound effects.
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  3. MiniMetro
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    I loved playing this game because it taught me how to think about designing public transportation. To be clear, real world public transportation design is much more difficult, but that’s kind of the point. If this is as difficult as it turns out to be…
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  4. Flipflop Solitaire
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    Solitaire reimagined. That is the point of this game for me – unlearning a lifetime’s worth of conventions is fun in its own right.
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  5. Peak
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    Games, they say, for your brain. I don’t know if that is true, but I have purchased the annual subscription, and made it into a habit. So far, I am enjoying playing these games everyday. I score the least in the Focus category (surprise, surprise) and do the best in language (ditto, ditto).

Of the five, I currently have the last two on my smartphone.

Links for 13th March, 2019

  1. “For most projects I’ll never look at anything in ARCHIVES again. But of course it’s easy to do so if I want to. And the fact that it’s easy is important, because it means I don’t have nagging concerns about saying “this is finished with; let’s put it in ARCHIVES”, even if I think there’s some chance it might become active again.As it happens, this approach is somewhat inspired by something I saw done with physical documents. When I was consulting at Bell Labs in the early 1980s I saw that a friend of mine had two garbage cans in his office. When I asked him why, he explained that one was for genuine garbage and the other was a buffer into which he would throw documents that he thought he’d probably never want again. He’d let the buffer garbage can fill up, and once it was full, he’d throw away the lower documents in it, since from the fact that he hadn’t fished them out, he figured he’d probably never miss them if they were thrown away permanently.”
    It is exhausting just reading it, but a very long article from Stephen Wolfram o how he organizes his life. You don’t have to go quite as all out – but you might learn a trick or two about organizing your life better by reading this article. God knows I need all the help I can get.
  2. “Nonetheless, this work suggests a potentially serious problem. Many situations in economics are complicated and competitive. This raises the possibility that many important theories in economics may be wrong: If the key behavioral assumption of equilibrium is wrong, then the predictions of the model are likely wrong too. In this case new approaches are required that explicitly simulate the behavior of the players and take into account the fact that real people are not good at solving complicated problems.”
    If I was to be (excessively?) cynical, I’d say this would mean that economists know nothing. But that isn’t necessarily true – Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality come to mind here. But the article is interesting about how to think about excessively complicated stuff – such as life.
  3. “In a low-saving, low-investment economy like the US, it’s a little hard to conceive that its possible for savings and investment rates to be too high for a country’s economic health. But that’s where China has been, and shifting away from established patterns is rarely simple.”
    To range across domains, there is this line from dietary studies that goes something like this: “It is the dose that makes the poison”. But if the USA suffers from too low a savings rate (maybe), China has the opposite problem. And this article does a great job of explaining the how and the why.
  4. “Historically, interim budgets in India have consistently overestimated revenue growth and underestimated expenditure growth. An analysis of the projected, revised, and actual budget figures since 1991 by Deepa Vaidya and K. Kangasabapathy of the EPW Research Foundation showed that deviations from budget estimates tend to be extraordinarily high for budget estimates presented in interim budgets ”
    This should surprise nobody, but budgets shouldn’t be trusted. Households budgets tend to have the same biases and errors that government budgets do, and for mostly the same reason – they’re drawn up by humans, who will be tempted to gloss over inconveniences. This article is full of interesting infographics that help you understand this point better – and also makes the point that an independent fiscal council is both necessary and overdue. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
  5. “But as the global giants arrive, they have been driving up salaries, rents, and reputations. Now some fear that the multinationals that once nurtured this fledgling technology powerhouse are unwittingly damaging the potent but fragile mix of entrepreneurship, military training, and chutzpah that drew them to it in the first place. That, they worry, could prevent it from developing into a mature digital economy.”
    Can you guess, before you click on the link, which country we’re talking about? Reading this article should make you want to read more about industrial organization, low interest rate environments, and urbanization – three of the biggest issues in economics today.