Economics has always fascinated me for various reasons, being a banker's son being the least of them. It has a certain beauty to its construct. In my opinion, economics was one of the first of the social sciences to emerge once humans settled into civilizations. Come to think of it, trade was fundamental to civilisational presence; exchanging what you have for what you need. Barter. So, it is imperative that the human mind developed a rudimentary notion of value and its varying association with different goods.
I will deal with the anthropological connect with Economics in a future post, but right now my mind is fixated with a more pressing notion. The economics of exam preparation.
We all know how stressful it can be to study for exams. It is an enormous co-operative effort by the different faculties of the brain-
a. The faculty of remembrance - to help us know there is an exam
b.The faculty of recognition - to help us recognise the portion from the syllabus
c. The faculty of discrimination - to help us discriminate important from the unimportant questions
... etc, to quote a few.
But the motivations to perform well in exams are many and varied. The most obvious one being the promise of good marks. That promise is largely driven by parental pressure. In India, parents exert an extra-ordinary amount of pressure in their child's education. I'm not saying its bad. But sometimes it is enormous and can be stressful. In a college situation, exams get relegated in the importance scale. The outcome calculus is binary. Pass or Fail. No one talks on the basis of a linear system of ranks. That binary nature is liberating, in a certain limited sense. The hope of a good performance is also driven, in college situation, by the need to make your resume look good to a prospective employer who comes to shop you. People generally don't accept it, but placement fear plays a big role in a student's attitude to exam preparation. Of course, I am stretching it here; people always don't look at long term consequences. But I'm arguing that the short term fear is, in turn, fuelled by its long-term counterpart.
Now, if one gets placed in a company at the end of three years, the entire equation is altered.
S = A +B -C
S= mood in exam preparation
A= parental pressure
B= personal ambition, motivated by various things- ultimately placements
C= distractions( internet, cellphone, pesky friends, boredom, etc)
So you see, once placed B vanishes to zero(almost), A is also absent since parents are happy you got a job.
All that remains is C. A negative influence on your mood. You get it??
Law of diminishing returns is a concept in economics. Wikipedia says:
I will deal with the anthropological connect with Economics in a future post, but right now my mind is fixated with a more pressing notion. The economics of exam preparation.
We all know how stressful it can be to study for exams. It is an enormous co-operative effort by the different faculties of the brain-
a. The faculty of remembrance - to help us know there is an exam
b.The faculty of recognition - to help us recognise the portion from the syllabus
c. The faculty of discrimination - to help us discriminate important from the unimportant questions
... etc, to quote a few.
But the motivations to perform well in exams are many and varied. The most obvious one being the promise of good marks. That promise is largely driven by parental pressure. In India, parents exert an extra-ordinary amount of pressure in their child's education. I'm not saying its bad. But sometimes it is enormous and can be stressful. In a college situation, exams get relegated in the importance scale. The outcome calculus is binary. Pass or Fail. No one talks on the basis of a linear system of ranks. That binary nature is liberating, in a certain limited sense. The hope of a good performance is also driven, in college situation, by the need to make your resume look good to a prospective employer who comes to shop you. People generally don't accept it, but placement fear plays a big role in a student's attitude to exam preparation. Of course, I am stretching it here; people always don't look at long term consequences. But I'm arguing that the short term fear is, in turn, fuelled by its long-term counterpart.
Now, if one gets placed in a company at the end of three years, the entire equation is altered.
S = A +B -C
S= mood in exam preparation
A= parental pressure
B= personal ambition, motivated by various things- ultimately placements
C= distractions( internet, cellphone, pesky friends, boredom, etc)
So you see, once placed B vanishes to zero(almost), A is also absent since parents are happy you got a job.
All that remains is C. A negative influence on your mood. You get it??
Law of diminishing returns is a concept in economics. Wikipedia says:
It is the decrease in the marginal output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.
So, in our analysis, the exam preparation mood is the output. The guarantee of job is the single factor that has changed. Rest all remains same. So, as the number of your job offers increases, it leads to a corresponding decrease in the motivation to study. QED.
Exam preparation follows this law strictly. That gives me a vague sense of peace.
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