I am a faculty of IT department in KG Someya college in Vidya Vihar and actually we are having engineering branch in two campuses in one in Sain branch and one in Vidya Vihar and I would be representing Vidya Vihar branch and in that one altogether we are having five branches of engineering offered and altogether it is having 120 intake per branch. So we would be having ten classes for the first years wherein we would be teaching computer programming one and with that one like to and for computer programming subjects it is taken care by computer and IT branch faculty and for that one we will be having two coordinators allotted one from computer department, one from IT department and altogether ten faculty are teaching for the subject two coordinators to coordinate the syllabus to keep the synchronization and for the evaluation I would be coming on later like how we are going to do and with that background I would like to have a look at the syllabus part first and as we are affiliated to the Mumbai University, Mumbai University has revised the syllabus for computer programming since three years back and the syllabus right now what we have to follow are for CP1 first semester it is including CC++ and the concepts of object oriented programming and for CP2 in the second semester they are going to learn the Java as a programming language and with the university thing as we can see on the screen they are we are taking three hours per week theory lectures and two hours per week for practicals and there is no practical exam to be conducted for the subject and for the theory evaluation we are having total 125 marks allotted for that one out of that 100 marks the theory paper will be there at the end of the semester and then 25 marks are the internal evaluations done that is by the teaching faculty and that are the term work marks and for all that evaluation we are having guidelines given by the university and this is the syllabus pattern given we are having structure programming using C++ so as a language C++ is introduced and then we are having prescribed hours for each of the topics given and in that one for the data input and output that is the second chapter as you can see we are having print off and scan of statements as well that means and in the along with that in the first chapter it is mentioned that C++ as a super set of C that means we should have a brief we should give a brief idea to the students about C as a language and for print off and scan of we should be showing them the syntax of C and then proceed for the C++ as a language and at the end of the chapter sorry at the end of the syllabus we are having introduction to object oriented programming in C++ where we are going to introduce about classes and objects and then after that that was about this total syllabus and according to the prescription it comes out to 38 lectures and we usually we follow 10 to 12 weeks maximum in a semester so it comes out to 36 regular lectures and on top of that we should be struggling to take the extra lectures to cover the syllabus which is a very difficult thing for us and for the term work max as was asked earlier they have to maintain a journal for the semester and that journal again it is prescribed in the syllabus they have to attach 25 programs whatever number of programs they are executing that is different but 25 should be there in their journal or their practical record and for that 25 again it is given like 5 programs on the fundamentals 10 programs on the control structures like functions arrays data structures all that part and again 10 programs on the object oriented part so like that we have to design the total list of experiments and then we are having the term of distribution for the max so as 25 max are to be allotted by the teaching faculty for that 25 again it will be like 5 max for the total attendance including theory and practical and 10 max for the journal or the practical performance and 10 max for the test and in our college we are following there will be 2 tests taken one will be the mid term test and the other one will be the end term test and these tests are to be of 50 max each and then total 100 max will be reduced down to 10 and that max are allotted for the student and then there are recommended books given for the subject so that was about the syllabus part and for the evaluation pattern it will be 100 max paper out of that 40 is the passing max for the student and then the question paper will be set in the university and then the evaluations are also done in the university as a cap analysis so the faculties are deputed from the college to the university where in the corrections are done and then again results will be declared by the university and coming down to the question paper pattern again there is a standard pattern maintained where are it is having total 7 questions given in the paper out of that first question will be the compulsory question and the pattern follows like each full question carries 20 max it can be a bigger question like one full program of some object oriented concept which carries total 20 max or it can be divided into 10 plus 10 or it can be 8 plus 12 like that and then till now like it is not given anywhere written anywhere that what will be the percentage of theory questions and the programming questions but it is observed that it usually comes out to 50 50 or like 40 60 60 40 like that and where the students feel the difficulty is to write the programs and this was about the term work mark earlier I have explained and I am having few question papers with me the sample papers these are the university question papers the first question was the compulsory question and then the rest 6 questions are there out of them any 4 they have to attempt 4 full questions there are totally 3 papers and questions like what would be the output of the following programs are also asked in the paper so like we cannot skip even the smallest part of the syllabus given like here as we see in the example they are having that increment decrement operator and what will be the output of the program and even like that even for the logical operators like left shift or right shift so they should be knowing the binary representation to calculate the shifting as well so there they find it we as a faculty find it difficult to cover that much detail for all the topics and for the practical aspect it was given the rough guideline from the university was given like 5 programs on control structures 10 programs on object oriented concept like that and we have designed an elaborate list of experiments for the students and in that one we are maintaining list of practice programs list of final programs so students have to attach the final programs in their journal and the practice programs are for their practice so they would be practicing in their lab notebooks which way they are maintaining so that will be a writing practice as well as for the implementation part and here as I am having only the first 10 experiments out of those 25 final plus some practice programs and then we have to give the next 15 programs and these details are loaded onto the internet where the students have access to them and then for the next list actually right now I am not having that I would be mailing them to the coordinators if you see the syllabus very nicely the syllabus states that C plus plus is a superset of C and then you have if you look at your input output C in and C out are mentioned like also ran somewhere in that list but you always scan f print f get car everything everything is it not 10 amount almost to say that for a major part of the course people be writing C programs and compiling them using C plus plus no sir they are you writing C plus plus programs and they are running it in what is what is C plus plus in most of the earlier part yeah you can say that only C in C out would be so here is a here is a simple test whatever programs they submit compile them using GCC not C plus plus and see how many errors you get my guess is you will not get a single error unless you are using C in and C out that those will be the only two things that is natural and there is nothing wrong with that and that is why now in retrospect we also have exactly a similar situation by the way we do not say C plus plus we say programming principles using C C plus Java but that is left to the instructor and that first course the syllabus is not decided by the CS department it is decided by other engineering departments because their students are being trained in the first course more than the CS tools so what this is CS tools you want to do something else you teach them separately but common course must have this now the way we have evolved our course looks very similar to this but if you see majority of the places there is a separate course in fundamental C programming and there is a separate course in C plus plus the dealing that yeah earlier syllabus it was like that for CP one for the first time they were having Unix with C programming right and for second time it was C plus plus with object oriented concepts right and with the revision we are having this so they are pushed it down don't the teachers find it slightly difficult it's very difficult sir like to explain the basic things like printf scanf are the function calls and C in C out are the objects like since the beginning the problem is there and students feel that C in C out are the substitute for printf and scanf which is not there that's right in fact I have permitted them to believe so there's no harm it goes on sir whatever we struggle for okay okay the I think the issue is to when you try to emphasize that object oriented concepts are something special and different than procedural concepts there cannot be any object oriented programming language which does not encompass basic procedures where the basic procedures have to be there so when you talk about what you call control structures if than us for while there's nothing object about it no that that is required anywhere and that's very fundamental logic so I believe that that is stressed everywhere whether it is Bombay University or any place but array okay array as a data structure of variables is distinctly different from let's say object class you take struct for example now struct and class are two slightly different paradigms but you can do the same thing using both yes don't students get confused when you do that yes surely I would think that even teachers get confused anyway that is life I guess I wanted to use this platform to have one one more clarification for my side like one of our senior faculty members is like he is insisting to do one experimentation like with the syllabus we were having difficulty like first thing we have to make them the student understand what is procedure oriented because we start with like what is machine language what is assembly language like first few lectures are with that only and then we see move forward for the different languages and then like it we are hardly able to touch the object oriented concepts at the end of the semester so like what he is insisting is we can start over all first with the object oriented programming itself then we will move top down because as you said like all control structures and all these things we will be using there also yes so like since beginning we'll make a habit of writing classes on the objects well yes and no I mean it all depends upon what you want to can as long as the student can solve problems using some programming in my yesterday's lecture I taught them awk in five minutes and told them how a tough lab assignment for which they are going to struggle for about two hours can be solved in a ten line program now having taught or I will ask questions in the monoc that is not permitted in Bombay University there is a prof in Trishur or Calicut who gave a talk here on teaching program he has joined IIT Gandhi Nagar now so he teaches computer programming using HTML and web and he says the most decent computer programming program development environment is the web why do you require compilers and they send that you can actually if you take JavaScript for example just JavaScript you can convey all the control structures all the notion of parameters differences everything and as a added attraction you tell them to solve practical problems train reservation they design a screen collect the thing you can even lead to databases at the back end so these are different I don't think as I said at the beginning there's no unique answer to that the problem with most teachers is that when you say this is the way you have to teach because this is the way I will examine then teachers lose their liberty to do the experimentation here like mostly the students ask us like on arrays like what are the major programs are still now and what are the solutions but I will I will also point out one more thing you see this present company is a very special company you all come from good institutions you all have experience in teaching the thousand teachers that we are talking about I am not even sure that all of them would be competent programmers there would be situations where 90% of the students within first three months will become better programmers than teachers and ultimately we are targeting all our efforts in giving something to the students that's the reason why I insist that teachers doing any training program must write programs as these two as they would expect students to write there's no shortcut to that so that is one part of the part and parcel of the training you know why why 15 days provide two weeks full-time program is because teachers how to do the labs exactly like the others do and this is the last question I wanted to ask you 25 programs are to be submitted by students now even if you have 10 teachers okay one teacher is for what 60 students 60 into 25 I will bet that no teacher will be able to physically read all 25 programs submitted by a student 10 teachers for theory lectures one teacher would be conducting the theory lecture for one class or one division no then who takes the lab articles for three batches are there of our 60 students 20 21 batches done okay and batches are allotted for separate teachers okay so 20 25 20 students 20 students into 25 programs 50 programs and I am the teacher okay I still give the same bet I'm willing to lose a whiskey bottle if you guarantee that all teachers for all labs read 25 into 2 that is 20 that is 500 programs physically I would think it is impossible I don't know what is I mean you would know right actually how we do is like per session we allot some two to three programs they have to perform and like in the batch whatever difficulties they are having they will put forward like some errors are coming some logical problems something of that sort correct and so we will help them out to solve that solution that the next session when they are coming the next lab they have to bring us the fair copy correct but the final journal that they will submit they will still be at liberty to replace an older program as a human now here is a question how can you ever imagine catching copying in the final submission it is impossible we we ask students to just tar their files and submit that tar as a submission so we have a common submission pool so that date time stamp and the students login is automatically logged in there and then we do something else we we are just doing this for the first time because we have had instances where people submitted an assignment which was done by some other student two days ahead by grabbing that so we are putting in a piece of software to find out similarities between programs so about let's say about six assignments they are submitted and 800 students so what 4800 programs and they could have multiple documents there over the next few days as we speak they will all be analyzed to find out similarity so such software I think that there is some open source software we are augmenting it but we should include that as part of the distribution that teachers can have this you see I will tell you the reason for this ordinarily if we are not strict about it then more and more students will be inclined to copy programs but we can't be strict about it because it is physically impossible to cross check this now this is a chicken and egg story unless we break this not somewhere we'll not be able to encourage students to do their own work like I was speaking I was first time and I heard this I was so shocked that MCA and B final year projects in some places in Tamil Nadu they were available for sale it seems then as I was traveling to Anna University that fellow showed me a big this thing it said assistants to engineering students and that is a nice name to say that you pay me so much money a project will be done and when I express my shock Krishna said is hardly anything that we can do about it except for while evaluating the student if we find out the student has not done much then he can fail or get less marks but they get away without doing such work when I was expressing this shock in a meeting in Delhi the vice chancellor of ignore you tells me he says the vice chancellor of Uttar Pradesh technical you see told me the Uttar Pradesh is very common and the ignore vice chancellor told me that Delhi has a refined version so if you just want a project report it costs three thousand rupees but if you want eight hour coaching on defending that project report additional two thousand rupees now this is ridiculous now why this is happening is that we have no mechanism of cross-checking so what what mechanism do you use I mean what is this is outside the syllabus and technical teaching but this is important part of educational process because typically project submission if you think just if it is allowed to do at the end only then this is very difficult to cross-check so whatever regular submissions are possible like fortnightly whatever developments have been that should be reported a journal kind of file kind of thing can be maintained at the teacher very he will submit those pages or whatever has been done and we recorded periodically only then we can say that they have done them so in fact then one suggestion would be we'll just find out because two things I found a missing revision control system either CVS or RCS I don't know how many of you use similar system because in turbo environment if your group projects for example now there are three or four people who are developing the same functions of programs now I put in a version you put in a version there could be huge confusion like any project development even if I am doing it alone I should have a control system for that and these things exist in Unix environment I do not know the corresponding thing there must be similar systems also in the Microsoft environment but it appears to me because none of you spoke about it I don't think your students or labs use that environment right now nobody uses them and one of the reasons is because I did not use it till now okay I used it after I stopped teaching programming courses although Unix environment had the revision control system even in the early days okay but subsequently all teachers have been using it and I found out why I had never used it myself whereas all the other younger teachers had used it now I will be using it now if we take thousand teachers the likelihood of these teachers themselves having ever used RCS are very remote in fact many of you might not have used revision control system so I will spend about 10 15 minutes tomorrow sometime to describe the RCS and I'm making RCS part of our distribution so that that will be a few advantages of RCS is that in final submission even though we track it electronically by asking them to put a tar file the final tar file only comes to us but if I have RCS I have RCS log I can know exactly what they how many lines were returned I can extract deltas and I can see which day what program portion was there progressive development now suddenly in that progressive development a major program appears as a new one obviously it's a coffee anyway so I would like to add regarding that project evolution what we do at our place we have got a project card given to every student so every week what the student does he has been allotted a guide so every weekend he has to check with the guide he will show his progress and on the progress card that is project card he will write what he did in that particular week and the guide will put a signature so that way we go on progressively evaluating the projects it is not like at the end of the same they just come up with the project but every week they have to go to the guide and show the project development and the guide will see it and put his remarks over there and after that like after every one month we'll have a project evaluation team the team goes there and they will evaluate the project respect of the guide sometimes it may possible that the guide will have soft corner for his student so we just form the teams and they evaluate them no for the main project I would like to get your expert opinion about some of the project evaluation part of external projects which the students do outside for example MCA projects are external right so we do find this problem not very often if they if he or she is an average student they can get a very good project excellent project from some outside agencies like this and they can train them and even though we have internal evaluation periodical evaluations they go to the guide and explain everything all this evaluation is happening but still we find it very difficult to get to know that whether it is really done by the student or so what could be the better mechanism to find we do feel that it is not done by him but there is no proof because he's presenting in extremely well manner he's he has learned everything he's with the technology language everything is spent but we understand that it's not been done by the student it rarely happens so is there any mechanism to really the worst case is when our own students let's say two people have gone out one fellow has actually slogged very hard done something and has submitted that work for full six months the other fellow is a street smart person who went to that Chennai shop or Delhi shop got the project paid 2000 rupees got trained he's more articulate than the other person and he comes back and scores many more marks than the other fellow this is non-solvable as long as the project is done outside in IIT Bombay we do projects if companies want projects to be done they sponsor it but there is a guide for the project in IIT Bombay who is responsible for certifying something something whatever what so there is no there is no solution there is no clean solution to this either the level of ethics among students is so high that they will not indulge in it that is in impractical even though these students are not bad people per se but they will be tempted you know there are hundred marks there I don't have time I want to do something yeah yeah and my father has 5,000 rupees so what's your problem that this problem is not solvable but if if we have ever a complete set of programs ever submitted by anybody in any university and if we can subject that to such test of similarity test then we can find that out I mean why papers are found out like that technical papers plagiarism is being caught like that we get routinely latest from my Tripoli and others a process either a year here this paper this paper has been verbatim quoted for three paragraphs by paper submitted by somebody wherever let's say Jalsakula now what action can we take so if grown-ups can be tempted to do this why do we blame the students I mean is I would not this is not good but this is what will happen you can only subject themselves he problem is that even in those few cases where you are able to establish that the student has not done it you only wrap the student on the knuckle you don't fail him you don't throw him out of the institution there's no exemplary punishment that is ever given if what is exemplary punishment is sets example so we also become lacks and frankly I don't know how this problem solved but I'm definitely aware and I'm concerned about it so that is what I saying smaller our coming back to our issue whenever we have this notion of 25 program submission etc. etc. this notion I think is not correct weekly submission as most of you said and you also mentioned that you will ask them to submit that grades we are maintaining in the teachers record okay okay that is done but I get the end of the semester all the sheets are there or not to check that one it is difficult no so instead why not we all decide we are talking about programming why can't people submit their programs and documentation electronically only why do I have to submit papers with signature because if you can do a DVD backup routinely okay let's say five or ten submissions ten DVDs for all the entire class I think you can you have solid records as far as the legality is concerned and the students cannot fake things later on so this is just one suggestion for the programming course and maybe if we initiate this the teachers who attend our training program could start using it for other subjects that the teachers were one solution for your thing is generally the students who do their projects externally will come back only on the last day to submit the project no not periodic the following you should insist on every week whatever code he has written it must be mailed to you it doesn't matter you you don't you to test he can email he should email the code this file with date now those files will be with you that will force the student either to purchase it well in advance but then he can submit he cannot submit it all of it on the first week so you have to study it and show okay today I have written this then tomorrow I have written this believe me if he does that he has understood programming so at least partial purposes are but this submission a weekly submission kind of thing if you make it mandatory that doesn't matter in one week if you have not written any code you say no code return but if he says for five weeks no code return and six weeks suddenly a course code appears then you know that there's some problem so if this this kind of simple tricks you can play with it because I have no other advice to give


I'll take away and use my students with the carousel or the idea of found poetry. I've seen this in a lot of the academic articles that I've read but never thought to use it with my students or in my own writing. So I'm excited to start that this week. Since I'm not in the class room anymore as a teacher, I do previous. I'm thinking that some of the information or knowledge I gained from this front row is something I can share with teachers. We don't have part of this protocol and I think it might be very helpful. I like the way this presents a very problematized curriculum to challenge students to sing out of the box. I'm really excited to be here and see what everyone else is doing. I just love the writing project because I can get all these ideas. I can bring it to my classroom the next day and even just being part of the summer since I've already used so many things in the summer, I'm like, the classroom is going to be such a huge difference to me. I just love the writing project. It's an opportunity for tenancy to energize me or re-energize me. We all get caught up, like in my programming, caught up sometimes in fundamentals and trying to make sure that I convey certain things. I fall into a bit of a routine. Here I come, I get inspired by the instructors but I also really get inspired by the other teachers and how they share their ideas. I think the program is fantastic. This is my second go-round and I've loved every minute of it so I appreciate what Smash Riders is doing. I'm here at Amherst Regional Middle School where she's also served as a foreign language teacher and as assistant principal. She exemplifies the writing project idea of teacher as writer. She has a wonderful blog called Maestra Teacher, which I've lurk on occasionally, and she has recently co-written a book with her mom, the uninvited who is here as our guest today, called Teaching a Life's Work, A Mother-Daughter Dialogue, which will be published in January by Teachers College Press. I'm really looking forward to that. Alicia is also an advocate for social justice and she was honored in 2015 by the Massachusetts Teachers Association with its Louise Gaskin's Lifetime Civil Rights Award. Thank you Bruce and everybody on the Western Mass Writing Project Executive Board for this honor. It really is an honor coming from my professional home, which as a teacher it's the place I always go to for resources, for ideas, for encouragement, and I really feel like it's a big part of why I've stayed in teaching. And this is my 24th year as a teacher. So thank you very much. I also want to thank my mom who's here, as you know. My mom has been my inspiration forever as a teacher herself and writer. It's just been such a pleasure to write a book with her. I mean how many people could get to write a book with their mom. It's been a very special time for me. And thank you for always being my biggest fan. Thank you at the Writing Project for just being such a big support. I think if not for those two summers that I did teachers as writers, that little week in the summer to write and in my own writing part of my summer institute, I don't know if I would have really immersed myself enough in writing to complete this project. So I'm forever grateful into the Writing Project. So I was thinking about the theme when I first got versus email and I went on YouTube and watched the video of the song. I don't know if anybody else did that. But the link I went to, the song was translated into Spanish. And I thought that's somehow really appropriate for voice and identity and respectful dialogue. And I was thinking that in that we are called upon to be translators, kind of cultural translators. When we bring literature into the classroom for our kids from a different perspective, we're translating for them something they can't necessarily see. And when we help them write about their own experiences for communication with the world, we're helping them to translate.


So my topic for this afternoon is game theory, or I like to add kind of subtitle to it, a game theory and entrepreneurial twist. So I think game theory is an area where I think it is potentially very useful to us as Austrian economists, and I'm going to build the case that there is a way that we can think of game theory as being really a part of praxeology and the overall logic of action, but the way that it is typically applied is perhaps problematic. So I think that it's probably best described. It's one of those cases where in theory there's no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is. So we need to get this right, because after all, the purpose of a theory is not to build some beautiful construct that people are good at math. Wow, that's a beautiful model. We're not looking for beautiful models that we can't take pictures of. We are instead looking for descriptions of reality. How is it that reality actually works? So this is also where it drives me crazy whenever you hear somebody say, oh communism is great in theory but just doesn't work in real life. We fundamentally misunderstand what theory is for in that case. The theory is there to explain real life. If the theory does not work in real life, you need a new theory. So my hope then is here to kind of lay out how game theory is often used to answer the fact that this often doesn't work in real life and how can we then use game theory more usefully that will actually be descriptive of the reality we see. So first, let's kind of give some legitimacy to game theory. I don't have to try too hard. Murray Rothbard actually talks about game theory very briefly in man economy and state and one of the appendices for chapter one. He says outside of economics, which he breaks down as crossover economics and catalectics, the rest of praxeology is an unexplored area. And then he lists some points where it kind of starts have been made. And he says a theory of games has been elaborated. So it seems that Rothbard considers a theory of games to be part of praxeology. It's about the logic of action. So it's not just about how can you win chess or how can you play a better D&D game or something like that. I'm also interested in that last one so we can have that discussion later if you want. But that's not what the lecture is about. What is game theory then if it's not about these types of things? So we're imagining now our cases where strategic interactions matter. That is where when I think about the action that I want to take, I need to take into account the actions that other people are going to undertake because the end result is going to be a combination of the choices I make and the choices that others have made. So I'm going to start then with a classic example. So here we have the prisoner's dilemma. So we have two people, Bonnie and Clyde. I would recommend if you're sitting in the back and it's hard to see the slides, definitely bring up the slide stream. I was doing that this morning. It works really well. So mises.org slash ppt. I definitely recommend that. I try not to use slides, but I haven't figured out how to describe this thing in words that would actually stay in my own mind, let alone everyone else's. All right. So the prisoner's dilemma, this is a classic story, goes something like this.  They're actually thieves, right? Taking money away from people. So eventually law enforcement catches up with them. We'll say that they're private law enforcement. So these can be the good guys in the story. Catch up with Bonnie and Clyde or take them into the police station and they separate them. So Bonnie goes in one room, Clyde goes in the other, and this is the deal offered. And so the police say, I'm going to go from Clyde's perspective, says to Clyde, so over in the next room Bonnie is either confessing to the crimes that the two have committed together or she's not. If she is confessing, then, and you don't confess, we can put you away for 10 years. We're going to get enough evidence from her to convict you of very serious crimes. So if she confesses and you want to confess too, we can engage in a plea bargain. We'll cut that down to five years for you. On the other hand, or if Bonnie is not confessing in that next room and you don't confess, we still have enough evidence to get you on some lesser crimes. So say two years of prison is what you can expect. But if you help us put her away and you confess while she doesn't, she goes away for 10 years while you get to just go home. You get to go home scot-free. So Clyde thinks about the situation. What does he want to do? Well, I'm going to make the assumption here that prison is bad. This is a case where higher numbers is not good. So Clyde considers each possibility because he doesn't know what is Bonnie doing next door. He can't see, he can't hear what she's doing. So he runs through each possibility. He says, well, perhaps Bonnie is confessing. In that case, if I confess I only go to prison for five years, not great, but better than the 10 years that I would get if I don't confess. So if Bonnie's confessing next door, I also want to confess. On the other hand, if Bonnie is loyal and true and not confessing, then I definitely want to sell her out because then I don't have to go to prison at all. That's the best possible scenario. So Clyde comes to the conclusion that it doesn't actually matter what Bonnie is doing in the next room. His best choice is to confess. Bonnie in the neighboring room goes through the same line of reasoning, faces exactly the same incentives that Clyde does and therefore reaches exactly the same conclusion. She also wants to confess regardless of what she thinks Clyde is going to do, whether he is loyal or disloyal or what have you. So we then have a simple conclusion of what is actually going to happen. We call this the Nash Equilibrium, named after John Nash who came up with this concept. It's actually a concept from math that he just applied to this type of situation. So we end up with the result that both of them confess they both go to prison for five years. So I want to point out just a few traits of this that make this what we call a prisoner's dilemma. So a prisoner's dilemma is not a prisoner's dilemma just because it's about prisoners. We use the same terminology in lots of other situations and it has a few key elements. The first element is there's exactly one Nash Equilibrium. I will show a case later where sometimes you end up with more than one or it's not so obvious what the prediction is going to be. Having one Nash Equilibrium makes it very obvious what the prediction is going to be. It's a very clear prediction here. Everybody confessing five years in prison apiece is what we would expect to happen. And so that's the first point, exactly one Nash Equilibrium. A second trait about a prisoner's dilemma is that Nash Equilibrium is supported by what we call dominant strategies. A dominant strategy is where whatever the action is you take is always the best action regardless of what the other person does. So in this case as you reason through we figured out Clyde actually doesn't care what Bonnie is doing in the next room. His choice, what it should be, is always the same. He should always confess. That's always going to be what's best for him. So that would be a dominant strategy. So Clyde has a dominant strategy of confessing, Bonnie has a dominant strategy of confessing as well. And then the last trait of a prisoner's dilemma which is why certain economists love these types of examples is that that Nash Equilibrium is lousy. Now lousy is of course a technical term. No, we would say it's not Pareto optimal if you want the technical term. But what do we mean by this? I like lousy better, I think it's more intuitive. What we mean is that there is another possible outcome that they could obtain if they just played the game differently. And they both agree that this other outcome is actually better. So in our case both of them confessing is that Nash Equilibrium would predict that as we went through the reasoning, we have a good reason to expect them to do that. Yet at the end of the game Bonnie and Clyde both say, gee, if only neither of us had confessed, we would have saved three years of each of our lives in prison. We would have been better off if we could have ended up in that bottom right corner instead of the top left. So now that we have this conflict between what is individually our best choice confessing and what is collectively the best choice, ah, now there's room here for economists to say this is really interesting. We want to find these types of cases because we can use this. So let's look at a more economic case. So we have something called the tragedy of the commons. So the image here is that Bonnie and Clyde were taking them out of somewhat modern America. We're putting them into a medieval village. In this medieval village we have hovels all surrounding the central grassy area.  So each of them have a choice of either using the commons or not. The problem is that if everybody uses the commons, we end up in the top left here, we end up just destroying the commons. They get over grazed or all of the grass gets eaten, it devolves into a mud pit over time. So now it's true in the short run you do get the benefit of your cattle, your sheep eating from it, but in the long run it becomes totally useless. Now it's also possible that neither of us would use the commons. So we have just this pristine wilderness in the middle of the town, and it's nice to look at, it's not particularly useful for cattle since we've decided not to do that, right? But at least it looks nice, it looks better than a mud pit. And then we have the other possibilities where one uses the commons and the other one doesn't. Well in that case whoever uses the commons uses it enough to actually get use out of it, but not enough to destroy it, which is of course beneficial. Meanwhile the person who doesn't use it clearly gets no use from it at all. So let's reason through this again to figure out with Bonnie and Clyde whether they would use the commons or not. So I'll start with Clyde again. So Clyde can either use the commons or not, so he thinks through, and so well if Bonnie uses the commons and I don't, then I get nothing from them at all. If I go ahead and use them I at least get that temporary benefit. Sure that the commons get destroyed in the long run, but I at least get something from it in the meantime. Meanwhile if Bonnie doesn't use the commons, well then I definitely want to use them because I can use them forever in that case and continue to feed my cattle, my sheep, and so on from the commons. It's extremely useful for Clyde. So Clyde then reaches the conclusion, it doesn't actually matter what Bonnie decides to do, he wants to go ahead and use the commons. Bonnie goes through the same line of reasoning, faces the same situation, and therefore makes the same decision. She also wants to use the commons. So what happens, we end up with the desolation of the commons over time. Now nowadays when we apply the tragedy of the commons you normally aren't thinking about common grazing land in the middle of a medieval village. We think about things like say fishing in international waters or these types of things. The way that I get benefit as a fisherman is by pulling fish out of the ocean, but if too many of us do this, fish populations decline and then we don't have any more fish. That's a problem. So it's the same type of situation, just change the animals you're dealing with I suppose. So that would be another application. If we look carefully, we see this is also a prisoner's dilemma. There's exactly one Nash equilibrium, a very clear prediction. It's supported by dominant strategies. It doesn't matter what Bonnie's going to do. Clyde's best choice for himself is always the same. And that outcome is lousy. That is, we all agree that the bottom right, the pristine useless wilderness would be nice to get some use from it, but at least it looks nice. I'd rather have it look nice than be a big mud pit. So we agree there's a better outcome out there. Another possible example we could see is the case of public goods. So in this case Bonnie and Clyde are thinking about how their getaway car is going to get away from their various escapades. So they need to have a stretch of road built, a stretch of highway, and they're thinking about how they can possibly fund this. So with public goods, first what a public good is by definition, public goods have two traits. The first trait is non-rivalry. That is one person's use does not interfere with somebody else's use. So I think probably the best example in my mind of a non-rival good would be something like radio waves. So I can tune into a radio station in my car and that doesn't prevent somebody else from tuning into that same radio station. In fact, we could all tune into that radio station as long as we're in that area. We don't get in each other's way. We don't get congested or anything like that. So that would be the first trait. The second trait is non-excludability, which is kind of what it sounds like, that you cannot exclude someone from getting the benefit if they want it. So the problem you run into with public goods is the possibility of free-riding. So Clyde is making the decision, should he help fund this highway so that they can get away more easily? Or should he just free-ride and let somebody else, in this case Bonnie, be the one to fund it? Well, if both Bonnie and Clyde decide to fund the thing, then they can split the cost between them. And for the sake of the argument, let's just say that Clyde is perfectly willing to pay half the cost of this highway. He thinks the benefit he gets from that is more than half the cost. But he would not be willing to pay the full cost. That's too much. And Bonnie similarly has exactly the same preferences. Exactly the same preferences is, of course, realistic. So Bonnie also would say, hey, I'm willing to pay half the cost. So in that bottom right corner, we have these beautiful highways that have been funded that everybody can use. Wonderful. On the other hand, if everyone just tries to free-ride, everybody waits for somebody else to pay for the thing, and then we end up with, well, who's going to build the roads? Well, nobody does in this case. This is of course why libertarian society is impossible. It's not my position. That is what you'll hear. Who's going to fund the roads? And this is exactly the reasoning. Of course, then we have those mixed cases of, well, what if Clyde free-rides while Bonnie funds the thing? Well, in that case, Clyde clearly benefits. He gets to use the road and doesn't pay for it at all. It's pretty nice. On the other hand, Bonnie really feels like she's been taken advantage of. She had to pay the entire cost of the road, but the benefit she gets from it isn't enough to really justify paying the entire cost. So what does Clyde decide to do? Well, he says, if Bonnie is going to free-ride, I want to free-ride too, because I don't want to pay the entire cost myself. It's not worth it to me. On the other hand, if Bonnie is going to fund the thing, then I want to free-ride because I'm perfectly happy if she pays the entire cost. So in either case, Clyde wants to free-ride. Bonnie wants to free-ride. We kind of see how this goes. And what happens? Who's going to build the roads? We see no roads built at all, and it makes it very difficult to get the getaway car to, in fact, get away. Meanwhile, they both agree there's a better outcome out there. If only they could find a way to split the cost of the roads between them, then they would be provided and they would be perfectly happy to go along with this. One more example. All again, prisoner's dilemma. One more example here, a depression trap. This is one argument you hear from, say, Keynes makes an argument kind of like this, and it has to do with wages in the midst of a depression and what happens. So in this case, Bonnie and Clyde have decided to give up their life of sin and instead are going to become entrepreneurs, employers, and they have employees. And then things start not doing so well in the economy and they have a choice. Either they can increase wages or they can keep their wages low. That's where they are now. If everybody keeps their wages low, we maintain the depression. Employees don't have enough money to stimulate the economy. This is not an Austrian argument. Okay, forgive me. This is the argument you hear presented. If everybody keeps their wages low, there's no income to support consumption. The economy stays depressed. On the other hand, if everybody increases wages, now all of our workers have money. They can now go out and consume more. That stimulates all of our businesses. There's no economic expansion and everyone's happy. Now, what about those cases that's kind of mixed where, say, Clyde keeps his wages low while Bonnie increases hers? In that case, Clyde, by keeping his wages low, gets to keep his costs down. If Bonnie's increasing her wages, her employees start spending more and Clyde gets to benefit from that. He's selling to them. So there's a profit then for Clyde, but Bonnie, on the other hand, takes a loss. She has to pay more in wages, but she's not getting any of the benefit from Bonnie increasing. So Clyde facing the situation says, well, if Bonnie's going to keep the wages low, I don't want to take the loss by increasing my wages. I'm going to keep them low. If Bonnie increases wages, I'm very happy to make the profit. So, either way, I'm going to keep wages low. And we end up stuck in this depression that we cannot escape from unless there is some way to get everybody to increase wages at the same time. So the typical conclusions we come to here, we, not including me, they come to here, is that in prisoners' dilemmas, we see that people are choosing optimally from an individual perspective. They very clearly are doing the right thing individually. At the same time, we're getting bad outcomes that everyone involved agrees is bad from a social perspective. So the obvious solution, we need the government to step in and solve these problems. Have the government step in and push up minimum wages so that all the wages rise that leads to an economic expansion and I occasionally have students that write papers about the minimum wage and they will often make that argument. And then I kind of feel like a failure. It's an argument that you hear. So we need the government to step in, push minimum wages up, that would allow us then to break out of this depression, lead to economic expansion. We need the government to step in and fund public goods with taxes. After all, all we have to do is make Bonnie and Clyde each pay half the cost of the highway and build it and they agree this is better than what happened. And we just regulate the use of the commons. So decide who gets to use it or how much, to ensure that we don't end up with desolation. So regulate how much fishing people can do, only allow certain amounts or sizes or what have you. And of course, we need to prevent prisoners from confessing. Okay, you don't often hear that particular argument. We might acknowledge that there's another player here that might possibly matter, society as a whole or something like that. All right, so this is the way we typically will see prisoners dumb as used by those that would talk about game theory or present game theory. So I want to question this. By bringing in concepts related to the Austrian view of entrepreneurship. So first, think about Mises' view of entrepreneurs as being ones that have good foresight. So according to Mises, as Dr. Klein mentioned earlier this week, Mises' view really what makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur is that they're acting under uncertainty. So to be then a successful entrepreneur, you're the one that has keen foresight. You're better at seeing through that uncertainty to what is going to happen than others are. All right, so successful entrepreneurs then have this trait of having very keen foresight. And then we also have the Kersnerian view that it's about entrepreneurial alertness. That is that we see those opportunities that exist and we seize those opportunities. So it's just having good eyesight or this alertness. So how would this then apply in a world of game theory? All right, let's revisit the prisoner's dilemma. So I would suggest that those with this entrepreneurial mindset that are alert, that have good foresight, they would not just declare the game lost and say the only way to win is not to play. Instead, they would change the game. After all, it's perfectly possible if we are in fact rubbing banks together that we might possibly think that at some point we'll get caught. So we plan for this. How can we set things up so that when we get into that situation that we actually end up with a better outcome, that we all agree is better? How can we change the game to make things better? And in fact, the reality is that game theorists and I'm talking about mainstream game theorists already know that there are a number of solutions to the prisoner's dilemma. There are ways we can tweak the game here and there to improve the outcome. So one example is if you just repeat a prisoner's dilemma multiple times, then that allows us to use punishment and reward strategies in later rounds to enforce better outcomes in early rounds. So we could play one of the most famous of these strategies is Tit for Tat, which is kind of a very warped version of the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is doing to others as they would do to you. No, that's not it, is it? As you want them to do to you. This is inspect. Tit for Tat is doing to others as they have done to you. So what happens here? Okay, we are partners in crime. We think we're probably going to get caught more than once. So here's what we're going to do.  This possibility of punishment then changes our behavior in that first round so we can end up with much better outcomes. So this is not something specifically Austrian. This is something where I went to a very mainstream graduate school and were taught about this. This is something that we know exists as a possibility. It's somehow we don't make the connection to maybe people are actually creative and will think of this themselves. It's only those of us in the ivory tower that think of these things. We get to watch the rest of humanity make bad choices until we force them to do otherwise. So let's re-envision Game 3 with this in mind. So the key assumption that sneakily was underlying all of the stuff we did in those four examples of the prisoner's dilemma was that the game is fixed. Of course, in reality, if we have entrepreneurial players that foresee the game coming, this tends not to be the case. We find ways to rewrite the rules of the game to make it more advantageous potentially. So what we need to do then, if we're going to use Game 3 what I would argue as well, we need to ask the right question. The right question is not, what's the Nash Equilibrium? The right question is, how might entrepreneurs try to improve the outcome of the game if it is possible? And if they're not doing that, if we do actually see the Nash Equilibrium happen, why aren't they doing it? What is it that's keeping them from being able to achieve what we all agreed to be a better outcome? Now, it might be that there's some hidden costs involved with that outcome that we don't notice. So in fact, that outcome isn't as good as we think. That can happen. After all, if we believe in subjective preference, I'm not the one playing the game. They know more about other preferences than I do. Or maybe there's some other rule that's preventing them. There's something in society as a whole that's not allowing them to fix the game. I would also want to point out, just for a moment, I mentioned before that, so you will sometimes hear Friedman's axiom, the test of a model is its ability to predict. On that basis, the prisoner's dilemma should be just rejected. Because I have run this as an experiment in many of my principal's level classes. The number of times that I've seen them actually, my students actually choose the bad outcome that would be predicted by Nash Equilibrium is extremely small. Virtually all the time, they find some other outcome. Which is wild, right? No, I'm not threatening them with prison. So I might need to up the stakes a bit. That might be a problem. I'm tempting them with bars of candy or something like that. But I love doing this because we play the game before we describe what the outcome is supposed to be. So students don't know what they're supposed to do. And then when they inevitably play the game wrong, then we can start doing the survey. So, okay, why didn't you do what you were supposed to do? Now, sometimes the students say, oh, I just misunderstood how to read the table. So you, in fact, would have betrayed your partner if you knew how to do it. But a lot of the time it's things like, well, actually I don't actually like chocolate that well. Okay, what happens if our prisoners aren't actually that concerned about prison time? Okay, now five years in prison may not be that bad. Okay, so we need to make sure we get things right. And if we're seeing where things are going wrong, again, there's something wrong with the theory. We're missing something, some fact about reality. Okay, so I suggest that these are the questions we need to ask. First, how would entrepreneurs try to improve the game assuming that we actually have the structure correct? And then why aren't they doing it if they're not? Okay, so I want to give some examples of using game theory wrong and then look at how we could potentially use game theory right. I suppose I'm reversing what Hayek's order suggests we should do. Well, so first, using game theory wrong, we can look at all those previous examples. The depression wages or forcing wages up or solving the commons, the tragedy of the commons or public goods problems. These are the ways we would use game theory wrong. We just take as given, this is what the game is, this is what the outcome would be. To fix the game we need to have some outside force come in. And I would suggest that Austrians are not immune to this. When you do look through the Austrian literature, it does seem that we do agree with Rothbard that part of praxeology is game theory and we do occasionally appeal to it. So there's this one paper by Krillian Dempster from 22 years ago now, which I have a paper about how monetary expansion affects the quality of entrepreneurs. I did not originally respond to their paper when I wrote this and sent it to the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, but one of the reviewers of that paper said, oh, you really need to deal with the Krillian Dempster paper. I thought, wow, I need to find out what that paper is. So I went and I found it and I found their argument. I was not satisfied with it. So eventually the associate editor of the quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics at the time started referring to my paper as my Krillian Dempster paper. It became such a big part of that paper was dealing with their arguments. All right, let's take a score one for peer review there. All right, so here's the Krillian Dempster argument. They're trying to explain why is it that entrepreneurs would invest in a business cycle causing the boom-bust cycle. After all, the idea here is if entrepreneurs are so good, this is what we call the rational expectations critique of Austrian business cycle theory. So Austrians love entrepreneurs. We think they're very good, have good foresight, that kind of thing. So if entrepreneurs are so great, they'll understand that investing amidst the boom phase, they're leading into the bust phase. They know the bust is coming. Why would you do this? Why would you invest in something that you know isn't going to last, is going to fall apart? Well, one of the arguments that's made is the one that Krillian Dempster make, where they suggest it's really a game theoretic problem. So imagine here that we have two firms, well, I guess two sets of firms, we're going to focus on one firm that is firm X, and then we have all other firms are also making similar choices. And your choices in the midst of the early phases of the boom or interest rates have been pushed down by credit expansion, do you decide to increase your investment to maintain its previous level? So what's going to happen? Well, the argument is, for firm X's point of view, if they see other firms increase investment, and they also increase investment, then their profits are going to be basically the same as all the other firms. So relative profits between firms will be equal, but then we also see the boom-bust cycle. Everybody's increasing investment, creating that of the boom phase, which must inevitably collapse. On the other hand, if they maintain investment in this case, then they're going to find that at least in the short run, their profits are less than the other firm's profits. They're not taking advantage of these low interest rates that they could in fact be taking advantage of to improve their profit at least at the moment. So in the case where others are increasing investment, firm X will want to increase investment as well, so they don't fall behind the other firms. Meanwhile, if all other firms just maintain their investment, firm X now has an opportunity to take advantage of these low interest rates to enhance its own profit, whereas if it just maintained investment too, it would just earn the same profit as everybody else. So better to outshine your competitors. So again, firm X would decide to increase investment. So it doesn't really matter what the other firms do. Firm X gets pulled into increasing investment, as do all of the other firms, resulting then in the boom-bust cycle. We should recognize the structure of this game. It has three elements. One, Nash Equilibrium, dominant strategies that Nash Equilibrium is lousy. We have relative profits equal and a boom-bust cycle, versus relative profits equal, no boom-bust cycle. I suggest probably most firms would rather not have boom-bust cycles, which means this outcome that we have is lousy. There's another outcome out there that is clearly better than this one. So it's a prisoner's dilemma, and we're using the standard prisoner's dilemma kind of reasoning. So how would I criticize this particular usage of game theory? I actually have a couple points. So the first is that the short-term perspective is kind of weird, and that we're really only looking at the short-run profits that we can make during the boom phase forgetting that the bust phase is going to come. That's kind of odd. Secondly, the emphasis on relative profit is kind of strange. It's like I'm only worried about how my profit compares to the people next to me. It's kind of a keeping up with the Jones's theory of profit maximization, which is kind of odd to me. And then the last point, which I think is the more fundamental for our talk here, is that we're not asking the right question. The question we need to ask is, why don't firms organize to prevent that increased investment? Why don't they find some kind of solution that is going to push them toward the better outcome? And that's the question we need to answer, or why doesn't this happen? And that is a question that, at least in my reading of their paper, I didn't see an answer to why they couldn't organize to fix this problem. If you want to know my answer to that, read my paper. It has to do with entrepreneurial quality. Now about using game theory right. So we've seen how game theory can go wrong and often does go wrong, specifically with the use of the prisoner's dilemma. But how can it go right? What do I have in mind for how game theory should work? So let's take a look. So I suggest that game theory will inform when entrepreneurs are going to seek creative, institutional solutions to nasty problems. So the prisoner's dilemma is a nasty problem. It's not immediately obvious what can be done. But entrepreneurs do things that aren't immediately obvious. That is part of their traits. They have good foresight. They're alert to what they could potentially do to solve nasty problems. That's why they earn a profit. So that being the case, I would suggest that all we can use is game theory to figure out when they're going to look for solutions. Even if we can't predict the solutions themselves, we at least know this is a situation where somebody will start looking for a solution. So one of my favorite examples where I saw entrepreneurship in action. This was several years ago. There's a British game show called Golden Balls. And the way this game show played, you had a couple players that made choices throughout the show and they won some pot of money. And then at the end they played a game called Split or Steel. So Split or Steel involved the two players that had the choice. They had two Golden Balls in front of them. Inside of one of them it said Steel. Instead of the other it said Split.  And here was what their payoff structure was. So in this particular case it was Nick and Ibrahim were the two people at the end of the game. And the rules of the game said that if both players play Steel then everybody walks away empty handed. At which point the winner is the BBC. They saved a lot of prize money. On the other hand, if both of you play Split then you take it as 50,000 pounds that particular episode that you split the 50,000 pounds evenly so you each walk away with 25,000 pounds. Not bad. On the other hand, if one plays Steel while the other plays Split then whoever plays Steel walks away with all the money. Well whoever played Split walks away with nothing. So here we have that structure just laid out right inside of a table format. So if we go through and we analyze how would we expect our players to behave in this situation. Well first let's analyze this from Nick's perspective. I like to always do whatever player is choosing the row because that's how I remember it. Alright so Nick says, well if Ibrahim plays Steel what I do literally does not matter. Because if Ibrahim plays Steel and I play Steel I walk away with nothing.  So it really doesn't matter in that case. On the other hand if Ibrahim plays Split and I play Steel then I get 50,000 pounds. Or as if I play Split I have 25,000 pounds. So there is some reason then to pick Steel over Split. Now a note here this is not strictly speaking a prisoner's dilemma as choosing Steel is not strictly a dominant strategy since in the case where Ibrahim plays Steel it doesn't matter what Nick does. It's still somewhat like I guess we'd call it a weakly dominant strategy. It's not obviously the best. Sometimes it's okay but oh well. Alright meanwhile Ibrahim faces exactly the same incentives has a reason to Steel, no reason to play Split so what we should predict is that the BBC will win the game. Both of the players walk away with nothing. Well if they both play Steel. But here this episode Nick was very entrepreneurial and he did something really bizarre. So in this game one other distinction that makes this different from the typical prisoner's dilemma is that they let the two players talk to each other about what their strategy is going to be. Now normally this is just kind of a lot of show boating of oh you know I'm a trustworthy person I would never betray you that kind of thing what game theory is called cheap talk. That's normally what you see.  So here's what he did. He said I'm going to change the game. So I'm telling you right now Ibrahim I am going to choose Steel. But after I choose Steel I will take that 50,000 pounds that I've won and I'll split it with you. I'll give you 25,000. And Ibrahim I believe literally said you're insane or something similar to that you're totally nuts. And Nick said no I'm a trustworthy person and I will play Steel. What a bizarre thing. But look at what he did. He just changed the circumstances of the game. So now we think about alright if we think Nick is in fact this crazy that he's willing to go on national television and say that he's willing to steal from the person he's playing with then what should I do if I'm Ibrahim? Well Ibrahim thinks through it. He says well if I believe him then I really do need to play Split. This is something that wasn't true before. He never had a reason to play Split before. Now Nick created a reason for Ibrahim to maybe play Split. Now it's still true he might think well okay Nick is crazy I might just pick Split just for I don't know for fun in that case I still want to play Steel. So Ibrahim now is caught in this dilemma this is much more dilemma than the prisoners faced what do I do do I believe Nick in which case I definitely want to play Split or do I think he's lying which would be a bizarre choice to lie about being a bad person in which case I want to play Steel.  So this is the outcome that we are then promised Nick says I'm going to play Steel Ibrahim picks Split it turns out Nick is a liar Nick played Split well go back and revisit the game after he has changed it what are his incentives now? Nick just made it so it literally doesn't matter what he plays as long as he's honest about the sharing it doesn't matter what he picks anymore so you may as well go ahead and pick Split you're going to split it anyway and then you save yourself having to write the check after the game or something like that so we end up then with a better outcome so what we would have predicted 0 for each isn't what happened we got 25,000 for each because Nick was entrepreneurial he knew how the game worked he had a plan for what he was going to do and he changed the way the game was going to be played another example which I think is much more economicy would be Jesus Huerta de Soto money bank credit and economic cycles talks about credit expansion how do we explain how credit expansion works and he imagines a case like this where we have bank A and bank B where each of them have the choice to either expand credit or not to expand credit and here are the results so if neither of them expands credit so they operate on a 100% reserve basis or something like that then we end up with both of them surviving and both of them earning a relatively small profit the bank fees that they can charge from depositors and that kind of thing on the other hand if both of them expand credit then we end up also both are surviving and they're in a larger profit as they now also make money off of the lending market now where we end up with trouble is when one expands and the other doesn't in that case the one that expands ends up losing a bunch of reserves as Dr. Patrick Newpin mentioned earlier this week and ends up failing so whoever the expander is in this mixed situation ends up failing while the other bank survives and so then what are the optimal choices? Well bank A says well if bank B doesn't expand then I don't want to either because if I do expand I'm going to fail and failure is not good for a bank on the other hand if bank B expands then I want to expand because earning a large profit is better than just surviving so we end up what bank A wants to do depends on what bank B wants to do and bank B faces the same situation here this is not a prisoner's dilemma in fact I believe fails on the first two traits we don't have just one Nash equilibrium we actually have two the first one that is where nobody expands the other where everybody expands we call this a coordination game other games that play out this way are things like which side of the road do you drive on it doesn't actually matter you can drive on the right, you can drive on the left as long as you know what everyone else is doing so in Alabama drive on the right in London drive on the left neither is necessarily better than the other so this is a coordination game what we want to do is get everybody on the same page is ultimately the goal and that is what we end up with here so what is then how does quarter disorder use this is conclusion is that prudent bankers would not want to expand because of this fear of failure so we would have if we have a banking system that is governed by prudence we would not see that much credit expansion in fact we would see very little if any meanwhile imprudent bankers would be the ones saying I'm willing to risk the failure for those big profits but every bank does have an incentive to try to coordinate to make credit expansion happen why go back again we can either both survive with a small profit or a large profit so between these two Nash equilibria one is actually preferable so this isn't quite like left side of the road right side of the road it's better okay that is like right side of the road left side of the road it's called the right side of the road people I'm an American alright so what does that mean bankers then want this credit expansion to happen if we can make sure everybody else is involved so we need to change the game to get rid of that upper left outcome where there's this reason to be scared of credit expansion and this is why he suggests bankers will push for central banks this is how bankers change the game so what does he suggest he suggests the game looks something like this so we change the game this way that is we have a central bank that is going to bail out anybody who's in danger of failure so the result then is that for bank A when they think about what's going to happen they say well if bank B doesn't expand and I don't expand I get a small profit if I do expand I get bailed out and I still get a small profit there's only no reason not to expand on the other hand if bank B does expand there's definitely a reason to expand because that large profit is possible meanwhile bank B goes through the same line of reasoning they're not really worried about failure anymore the central bank will bail them out to prevent that failure from happening so therefore all they have to worry about is the possibility of that large profit so what do we just do we just eliminated the less desirable Nash Equilibrium and now we're down to just one the more desirable one from an extra-economist perspective and this I would suggest is a good way of using game theory because what did we do we laid out the situation we said here's where we would have problems potentially and here's how entrepreneurial banks would try to solve this situation in this case they'd appeal to the political system to enforce the outcome that they like better so there are other possible solutions when we look at some of these other games so things like a general prisoners dilemma I already mentioned repeated games are a way that we can solve this there's also perhaps the use of enforcers I like to call this breaking the confessor's kneecaps okay I didn't go to prison but it turned out there's a third person involved in our criminal enterprise who's going to take my knees out when I leave the police station that is going to change the outcome most likely and then the tragedy of the common so one thing this is something this is not specifically Austrian just privatize the common so that tends to solve this problem if it is my field I don't want it to devolve into a mud pit so break the thing up give each farmer an area of the commons and they were going to tend to try to manage it well we also have Eleanor Ostrom's work on managing the commons where she went through and looked at cases it was one of the odd things about the tragedy of the commons is that you feel like the conditions should apply a lot of the time but yet we don't see a bunch of mud pits around so why is that is kind of what Ostrom suggests this is one of those cases where the theory is very strong and also very wrong didn't predict what actually happened and what she found was that communities are actually pretty good at managing the commons if we recognize she found some conditions that are necessary and they're not like the conditions of many of these highfalutin mathematical theories to be correct these are things that we do actually see happen and can believe happening we have a relatively well defined community of people using the resource small fishing village in Nepal it's believable we know who all the fishers are going to be we have a resource that we all recognize is important well yes we're all eating fish every day we all recognize that's important and then if we have some way to come up with rules that we can then enforce these are not hard things to have happen and what Ostrom suggests is that that's why we see that actually happen instead of mud pits and then with public goods we have options, things like matching funds as an opportunity so here what I mean by matching funds I think thinking about Kickstarter is probably a good way to get this so for those who are unfamiliar with Kickstarter I don't know if there's anybody that would be unfamiliar with Kickstarter at this point but what it is it's a contingent payment system so people come up with some kind of project that they want to do and then they put it up on the website and then you can make pledges to make sure this project happens it's often used for creative types of activities like making a documentary about something but I need a bunch of money to make that happen so then you ask people to pledge and normally those that pledge get some kind of benefit it might be you get your name put in the credits or maybe you get if it's a book a copy of the book maybe a signed copy if you pledge more that kind of thing and the way it works is that if whatever the project is doesn't get fully funded then nobody has to pay so it's this nice contingent payment system which allows me to say if this happens I am willing to pay $40 for this book if it doesn't happen I wouldn't be willing to but I can pledge the 40 and then we'll see what happens and that is something that we've seen be very successful at funding would often be considered public goods Reading Rainbow I like to talk about here I remember this from my childhood because I remember the 80s I was a show encouraging literacy and it was on PBS funded then largely by taxes and also by donors well they decided they wanted to try to make kind of new content available to classrooms so LaVar Burton started this Kickstarter program to try to get this out into classrooms and raised $5 million on Kickstarter people were willing to chip in to make this project happen and this didn't require that we get some grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting or something like that people were willing to chip in to make it happen as long as they knew others would and Kickstarter was the way of guaranteeing that so this is another case where we can see an entrepreneurial solution that has now been institutionalized by a website if you want to fund a project use Kickstarter and you can see whether people are willing to fund you or not or in my case if you want to fund the project up on and offer to do it so wrapping up then I want to suggest or remind you there are two ways we can think of game theory we can use it the wrong way saying things like all we're going to end up with lousy outcomes from individual choice so the obvious solution is to eliminate individual choice or we can use it the right way and point out that lousy outcomes attract entrepreneurs so we need to ask what are they doing to fix these problems and if they're not why not what's getting in their way to keep them from fixing these problems thank you


Welcome back to the session on latex. In this session, we will look at a new environment called table using which we shall add captions and position the table. The table environment is just wrapped around the regular tabular code that we would write to create a table. It starts with slash begin table and the position in box brackets. Note that position is optional. Then goes our regular tabular code which is then followed by a command called caption which will add a caption to the table. Finally, ending the table environment. Let us build this example. I am switching to tech studio. I already have section 1 with two paragraphs followed by a table and section 2 followed by some other paragraphs as well. Let us write slash begin table. We delete this. Let us align it as center. So, we write centering. Let us indent the tabular environment for better readability. Then we come here and we write slash caption to add caption for the table and we will add a caption called stationary items and we end our table environment. So, the regular tabular code along with the table environment centering caption. Let us build and run. Notice something. The caption stationary items is preceded by the table and the table number. Also note that the table moved above section 1 which was earlier after section 1. Latex places the table on the page wherever it best fits in. This is one reason why we should not bother much as to where our tables would appear. Nonetheless, our decision is final. So, latex gives us a facility to mention where we would like our tables to be placed. Let us mention a position over here and we write h. h stands for place the table here. As you can see the table is placed at the position where we have mentioned it. That is after section 1 and before section 2.  Build and run. Well, we now have the table placed at the bottom of page number 1. An interesting point to note is that the table appears between the paragraphs of section number 2. All of this is handled and typeset automatically by latex. Let us create one more table by copy pasting it after section 2. We copy, we come here and we paste. Let us change the position to h and change the caption to more items. Let us build and run. So, we now have the second table on page number 2. If you recall the command slash table of contents creates table of contents. Similarly, slash list of tables will display the list of tables and the page numbers. We usually write this command after the table of contents command. Let us write slash table of contents and slash list of contents tables. Let us build and run 2 times to generate the table of contents and list of tables. As you can see latex has listed out the captions of both the tables along with their respective page numbers. Let us switch back to our slides. We just had a look at the example of list of tables command. And now you can add captions to the table, generate list of tables and position the table appropriately in the document. Thank you. Have a nice day.


It's narrated that during the battle of the Khandak, the battle of the trench, when Medina was under siege, the army had Medina surrounded, the Quraish army had Medina surrounded. No one was allowed in or out. Nothing was going in and out. Does it sound familiar, brothers and sisters? Does it sound familiar? Does it sound like Ghazza? Medina was surrounded by the enemy. They were under siege. No one was going in or out. Trade wasn't happening in or out of Medina. They were under siege. And a Sahaba by the name of Jabr, Radi Allahu An, he narrates this. It is narrated that Umar Radi Allahu An, or maybe another Sahaba, there's different narrations, but Umar Radi Allahu An, let's just say, came to the Prophet Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, and he was starving. He was hungry. And so he lifted up his shirt to Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam to show Rasulullah, look at my situation. I'm hungry. I'm starving. And what did Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam respond with? He lifted up his shirt and he had two stones tied to his blessed torso. He had two stones tied to his blessed torso, telling Umar Radi Allahu An and all the companions that I'm hungrier than you. I feel your pain. In fact, I'm feeling it more. Subhanallah. In Jabr Radi Allahu An, he's on the sidelines and he's seeing this interaction take place. And he says to himself, this is an injustice. How is God's messenger this hungry? How is God's messenger this hungry? This is a Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and he's starving. And so he decides to do something about it. He goes home to his wife and he says, whatever we have, whatever we have, whatever food we have, prepare it, we're going to feed God's messenger. We're going to fix this injustice.   And look at the, this is our Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. He says to Jabr Radi Allahu An, he says, Wahdi Ya Jabr, Wahdi Ya Jabr. Buy myself, O Jabr. Alone, O Jabr. Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam is more hungry than everyone else. And he's thinking about his companions. He's thinking about their pain, what they're feeling, Subhanallah. And so Jabr Radi Allahu An, he's in a position because he doesn't have enough to feed everyone. He doesn't have enough to feed anyone, but this is what Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam said to him.  And so Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam goes and he invites everyone and he says everyone, Jabr is feeding us. Jabr is feeding us. And Jabr Radi Allahu An, he's scared, he's stressed out because he doesn't have enough to feed everyone. And Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam says to him, Don't serve anyone until I get there. Don't serve anyone until I get there. And then Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam gets there and he blesses the food and he blesses the food and everyone is able to eat. And Jabr Radi Allahu An narrates that the food is not finishing, the pots that are holding the food. It's not finishing. It's not finishing. Everybody's eating. Everybody's being satisfied. Subhanallah. Subhanallah. What's the lesson in this story, brothers and sisters? What are the takeaways for us? The takeaway is this. Jabr Radi Allahu An, there was an injustice happening. Rasulullah Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam and the companions were starving. They were under siege. And Jabr Radi Allahu An decided to do something about it. And because he did something about it, Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala allowed a miracle to happen where everyone was fed and everyone was taken care of. He saw an injustice and he did something about it. And Allah Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala allowed a miracle to take place where everyone was taken care of. That's the first lesson. The second lesson is Jabr Radi Allahu An, he didn't solve the whole crisis. He didn't end the war. He didn't destroy the enemy. What he did was small, but it wasn't small. It was big. He fed everyone. He fed everyone and he gave them the strength and the nourishment that they needed in order to fight off the enemy. And so, brothers and sisters, this story applies to us right now.


Good afternoon. For those who are new, I'm Dr. Theron Sherman, and today we will be studying SCP-420. This document contains light elements of body horror. With that out of the way, let's begin. Item number, SCP-420. Object class, safe. Special Containment Procedures. SCP-420 is to be contained in Storage Locker 1014-420 at site. Level 3 clearance is required to remove it from storage. Samples of SCP-420-1, not in use for testing, should be stored in the container marked SCP-420-1-DECON in Locker 1014-420 until they lose potency, at which time they can be disposed of as biohazardous liquid waste. Please make note of the time and date in the attached log when samples of SCP-420-1 are added to the DECON container. Those infected with SCP-420-2 are non-contagious. And should be contained in Standard Solitary D-Class Secure Confinement. On reaching Phase 3, infectees' rations should be doubled. Phase 4 infectees should be kept under constant surveillance for signs of advancement to Phase 6, in which case the infected must be destroyed by high temperature incineration. Description.  When emptied, a small amount of whiskey-like liquid designated SCP-420-1 remains in the bottle, appearing as liquid adhering to the sides. This liquid pulls back into a few milliliters of SCP-420-1 over time. Drinking SCP-420-1 will cause SCP-420-2, a non-fatal but consuming degeneration and mutation of skin and keratinous tissue, hair, fingernails, etc., in the infected. Cases of SCP-420-2 should be contained for further study. Early cases can be treated. See treatment below. SCP-420-2 has only been shown to affect humans. SCP-420 cannot be washed out. Liquid added in turns into SCP-420-1. When poured out, SCP-420-1 retains its properties for up to 48 hours. Chemical analysis shows no anomalies in SCP-420-1 before or after loss of potency. It is identical to Redacted brand whiskey when potent, and has all the same effects in addition to causing SCP-420-2. When it loses its potency, the chemical structure changes to that of concentrated urine. Urinalysis of decontaminated SCP-420-1 shows that it belongs to a human male, with severe liver degeneration. Further analysis using Data Expunged shows that the urine contains trace quantities of Data Expunged consistent with SCP-420-1. Research shows Data Expunged SCP-420-2's infection process varies somewhat from patient to patient, but can be described in several phases. Detailed descriptions for therapeutic purposes can be found in medical document 420-A-4 attached. Brief descriptions for containment purposes follow Phase 1 Immediately to 12 hours after consuming SCP-420-1, the infected's mouth becomes dry and swollen, leading to slurred speech. Note that this slurred speech is not consistent with intoxication. Recording 420-C-004 attached contains a comparison of speech patterns resulting from intoxication compared with SCP-420-2. Within 24 hours of consuming SCP-420-1, the infected's finger and toenails become extremely brittle, cracking up the finger and bleeding. Fingernail growth is at the same time accelerated. Ingrown nails are an inevitability. Infection of these ingrown nails and open sores is identical to uninfected subjects. The infected's hair exhibits similar characteristics.  Like nails and hair, growth is also accelerated, replacing lost tissue and growing more in heavy, thick folds. Genetic analysis of keratinocyte show mutations similar to skin cancer. The tissue undergoes additional vascularization similar to cancer cell metastasis. Though apparently cancerous, these cells have not shown any tendency for detachment resulting in systemic spread. Thus, Phase 2 is not malignant. Even if Phase 2 keratinocytes are injected into the blood, they will reattach to the skin layer or die. Intervation of the site is fully functional. Growth of the skin folds inside the infected's mouth prevents communication, although growth progresses such that the infected can still breathe indeed. Infectees show a complete disregard for what they eat. Only one post-Phase 2 infected has been observed outside laboratory conditions. See recovery log 420 below. The majority of SCP-420-2 infectees die due to malnutrition or food poisoning, infection of open wounds, or alcohol poisoning from overconsumption of SCP-420-1 in this or earlier phases. Phase 3 Three to six weeks after Phase 2, the infected loses innervation of the skin and other keratinous surfaces. Nerves in the skin layer grow uncontrollably, but no longer send signals back to the central nervous system. Genetic analysis of skin samples from this time shows mutations in keratinocytes so severe as to no longer resemble human DNA, though individual samples suggest the mutations are random. Analysis of samples from different infectees show a consistent mutational path leading to a final genotype with relatively little variation. In other words, the skin of the infected is a different organism entirely, possibly a different species, related only to other infectees' skin. At this stage, tumors may form inside the skin layer, analogous to several types of tissue, including muscle and secretory cells. Also at this stage, the skin slows its cracking and falling apart.  Fingernails and hair grow out from the skin at apparently random locations. Phase 4, 3 to 7 days after Phase 3, the skin begins to twitch and writhe on its own in apparently random patterns. Differentiated tumors develop into whole surfaces of contractile and other tissues. Small throats begin to form leading from the outside of the skin to the circulation of the host, but are mainly non-functional at this point. The host's mouth still does most of the eating, although the host itself doesn't appear to be eating now. The mouth is instead working on its own. Cat scans of the host's brain activity show panic and fear is the only dominant thoughts, and motor groups in the jaw muscle area are not recruited. Rather, chewing and swallowing are now forced by the motions of the mutated skin. Phase 5, 1 to 2 days after Phase 4, Phase 4 and 5 may overlap significantly, with different portions of the skin entering Phase 5 faster than others. The twitching and writhing skin activity gives way to organized motion. The skin can now be considered a separate organism from the host. It moves the body like a puppet, albeit slowly, and exhibits extremely rudimentary intelligence. It is a scavenger organism and opportunistic predator. The skin digests food by excreting a clear enzemaeus fluid onto proposed food, leaving it to digest, and then folding the food into itself. Ingested food is taken into folds lined with thick, heavy hairs and keratinous plates leading down into the throats. Inside this mouth, a grinding net of keratinous plates breaks down food, which is then filtered and absorbed into the host's blood. Activity scans of the brain show many hosts at this stage have gone insane. Some, however, seem relatively calm, and are processing input from eyes and ears normally. Phase 6, most of the infected remain at Phase 5 indefinitely. The trigger which causes a shift into Phase 6 is unknown. The skin begins rapidly growing hair and keratinous teeth, increasing in mass, and data expunged. Infected patients who appear to be entering Phase 6 should be destroyed immediately by total incineration. Treatment SCP-420-2 can be treated in Phase 1 by aggressive radiation and chemotherapy, coupled with constant intravenous administration of Formula 420-A09T-T174B, see Medical Document 420-A-4 for Pharmaceutical and Chemical Properties and Therapy Description. The treatment has a 73% success rate, full removal of SCP-420-2, and 21% fatality. From Phase 2 onward, constant administration of 420-A09T-T174B will slow the progression by 2 to 10-fold, but rarely removes it entirely. Success rate of full removal of SCP-420-2 drops by about 25% per day after the onset of Phase 2. Additionally, 420-A09T-T174B appears to be at least part of the trigger to entering Phase 6. 420-A09T-T174B treatment should be halted in Phase 5. Recovery Log 420 SCP-420 was found in the possession of an unidentified vagrant in United Kingdom. Agents had been sent to investigate reports of a, quote, bridge troll, which was revealed to be the aforementioned vagrant in Phase 5 of SCP-420-2. The vagrant's skin appeared to be using SCP-420 to create and drink SCP-420-1 constantly through its mouths. Although its primary sustenance came via refuse, local pets, and redacted, the vagrant was collected and designated SCP-420-A. SCP-420-A perished during experimentation on 2010 and was incinerated after autopsy. Thank you for listening.  Please become a patron or visit our merch store at the link in our bio to support our work. Secure. Contain. Protect.


Trade it and upgrade it now at Appalachian Wireless and receive up to $700 off when you trade your old eligible device in and upgrade to a new iPhone 14 Pro Max or Samsung S23 Ultra on an unlimited Appalachian advantage plan because we are you. We are Appalachian Wireless. Big Sandy Community and Technical College in Prestonsburg will be holding a women's conference as part of their library seminar series. So we have some academic presentations which are still going to be fun. We have a professor of biology who is coming to speak with us about healer sales. We have another professor who's going to be talking to us about women in fairy tales. So I think we have something that's going to appeal to everyone. The goal of the conference is to teach, promote and encourage women to learn about self-care, motivation, women's history month and self-expression through art. These days a lot of people jump on the bandwagon and do something for every single month. Here at the college we have always tried to hit all of the different months but in January, February and March we focus on first and January Appalachian history. So we look at something from our own perspective. February we do Black History Month where we have events that focus on Black History Month and then in March of course with it being Women's History Month we focus on women's history. The women's conference will begin at 9 a.m. on Friday, March 31st. Pre-registration for the women's conference is available. For more information about the event you can visit the Big Sandy community and Technical College Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsea Dean.