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Principles of Macroeconomics?
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I'm really desperate to get this book in time for my midterm and I've been trying to dedrm this for days with multiple failures. If you can help me out, I'll forever appreciate it...
Hi there. This page is a collective effort on behalf of several concerned students, but I'm the individual in particular that set it up and wrote some of the stuff for it. It's very much a stagnant work-in-progress, but it's really hard for me to work on this stuff and be a full time student and have a job and so forth. This was actually inspired by a larger previous effort at USF, which I encourage everyone to check out.
I'm glad our message resonates with you -- a desire for free education (and indeed, an education that is geared towards attaining and realizing our capacities as human beings, and not just developing skills to produce us as laborers for a workplace) is definitely what we're about. I would, however, say that a centralized database is a bad idea; not only are they pretty easy to take down once some angry copyright holders get wind of it, but it can be pretty easily and quickly tied back to individuals that will then have legal liability for the infringement. That and most hosting sites tend to routinely check their files for copyrighted material and purge it. There are already some centralized databases (gen.lib.rus.ec is the one we champion) which have the benefit of being hosted in other countries which don't like us very much at the moment.
The idea in mind here, by spreading informational resources and helping people find what they need if they submit requests, is that this legal liability is kind of "diffused". We can't really be held accountable for sharing the location of shared material or telling people how to find it, and it's very, very unlikely that anyone is going to file a DMCA lawsuit against some lone college kid who downloaded some French textbook PDF a year or two ago.
The only problem I tend to find is that some people really just need physical books. My idea is that, in general, it's still cheaper to download and then print out certain textbooks, even using the university printers (which recently had their rates raised). For example, take this 7th Edition Principles of Macroeconomics textbook. Amazon lists the new price as $231, the used price as $112, and the rental price as $30.
This book is 576 pages; this means that if you printed each page of the PDF on half of an 8.5x11 in landscape orientation, you could fit four pages per paper (2 front, 2 back). This means you would only need to print out a total of 144 papers, folded in half. At a cost of $0.12 per page Black & White, this brings us to a total cost of $17.28 -- which is dramatically cheaper than all other options, including renting. If you have access to a free PDF and don't mind being a little resourceful, but want physical paper, you can still save a ton of cash (and you can even give away or sell the printed pages to another student for what it cost you to print it). Bear in mind too, of course, that you can print it chapter by chapter for a few dollars at a time, spreading out the meagre costs over a longer period.
The other issue is that some books are simply too new and aren't available online. One option is to establish a decentralized network of DRM crackers who crack eBooks and make them available (this is highly illegal and would need to be kept a very careful secret), and the other is to have a student take the plunge, purchase a book from the store, scan it, and return it as soon as possible. It's a bit tedious but it really only takes 20-30 minutes, and once it's done it doesn't need to be done again. If we could encourage just a handful of students here and there to do this, it could make a big difference for everyone.
Even though what we're trying to do here is important and has the potential to have some effect, things simply can't get done unless students take action into their own hands: sharing the location of textbooks with their classmates, scanning materials, and sharing them freely without trying to profit from their own tech savviness or access to information.
Edit ~ Also, the Facebook page for Florida Student Union has been posted elsewhere in here. We have meetings on Thursdays at 5:00 PM in the DM Pit and we might broach this subject next meeting, as well as our table on Wednesdays. If anyone would like to get involved and help out, we could always use it. Send us a message! :)
>The real interest rates tells us the real cost of the loan. It doesn't matter what the inflation or deflation is, as long as it is steady and known.
i serious don't understand what are you trying to say.
I provided you the math showing you that deflation adds up to the (real) cost of loans while inflation can be subtracted. The % risk markup that a lender wants covers his effort and the possibility that the borrower will default which is the same regardless of the inflation or deflation rate.
I'm not sure if you understood the concept of real and nominal and deflation and inflation itself.
>banning people from keeping money
I never said anything about banning. I just said that inflation gives an incentive for people to bring their money to banks where it can be reinvested in businesses.
>I just did. Inflation is no incentive to invest. It's an incentive to spend.
debatable. There is no math behind i know that can prove this since its more of a psychological thing.
> Investment is incentivized through the real interest rate. Inflation and deflation do not change the real interest rate.
see top... i linked you a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_interest_rate) saying:
>If, for example, an investor were able to lock in a 5% interest rate for the coming year and anticipated a 2% rise in prices, they would expect to earn a real interest rate of 3%.[1] The expected real interest rate is not a single number, as different investors have different expectations of future inflation. Since the inflation rate over the course of a loan is not known initially, volatility in inflation represents a risk to both the lender and the borrower. In the case of contracts stated in terms of the nominal interest rate, the real interest rate is known only at the end of the period of the loan, based on the realized inflation rate; this is called the ex-post real interest rate. Since the introduction of inflation-indexed bonds, ex-ante real interest rates have become observable.[2]
there is clearly there is a link between the inflation rate and real interest rate
>But my main point is, I have still not seen sufficient theoretical groundwork,
you could start with the college lecture about this topic
Its 500+ pages thick and covers all the basics of our "current system" that is based on Keynesian
If you could help me out I would greatly appreciate it :)
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