I recently enriched my vocabulary with expressions like “marginal product of labor,” “price elasticity,” and “isoquants”. The Edgeworth Box. Partial equilibrium. Certeris Paribus. Hutzelpoh.br /br /And why is that? Because, well, we have an increasing group of people here at a href=”http://perimeterinstitute.ca/”PI/a sharing an interest in complex systems. For reasons you find in your daily newspaper, these meetings have turned into more or less regular discussions about economic models, and I thought opening a textbook on the matter might be a good idea. See, a href=”http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/en/Events/The_Economic_Crisis_and_Implications_for_Science/The_Economic_Crisis_and_its_Implications_for_The_Science_of_Economics/”we’ll even have a conference here to save the world economy/a. I gracefully declined being among the local organizers. Not until I can say “asset-backed securities” and “collateralized debt obligations” without blushing.br /br /Thus, one could find last week on the quantitative finance arXiv a paper by Samuel Vazquez on a href=”http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3840″emScale Invariance, Bounded Rationality and Non-Equilibrium Economics/em/a, and a href=”http://arxiv.org/abs/0902.4274v1″emTime and symmetry in models of economic markets/em/a by Lee Smolin. Among other things, Lee discusses the question of gauge symmetries in economic models. For an introduction into the topic, I recommend Eric Weinstein’s talk on “Gauge Theory and Inflation,” that you can find at PIRSA: a href=”http://pirsa.org/06050010/”06050010/a.br /br /A remark on footnote 11 of Lee’s paper. Of course there is private health insurance also in Europe. The difference to the USA is that health insurance companies are required to provide a governmentally set minimum of coverage, and it is mandatory to at least have this coverage (which in Germany is referred to as “insurance duty”- Versicherungspflicht.) The USA is besides South Africa the only developed nation without universal health coverage.br /br /Further, it is unclear to me in exactly which sense education in Europe is supposedly more or less “socialized” than elsewhere. As far as I know, the USA too has a a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school”public school system/a. And though France and Sweden traditionally have not had and still don’t have tuition fees for universities, a href=”http://www.unibz.it/en/students/fees/default.html”Italy/a/span, a href=”http://www.tostudyinspain.com/spain-cost-of-living/”Spain/a and the a href=”http://www.studychoice123.nl/web/site/default.aspx?m=nieuwsamp;id=161″Netherlands/a do. a href=”http://www.studis-online.de/StudInfo/Gebuehren/tuition_fees.php”In Germany tuition fees for public universities have been discussed on and off over the last years, and presently regulations differ from state to state/a. But there are of course a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_university”private universities/a also in the European Union that will happily charge you money for a degree. (I’m not an expert on the European Union just because I have a European passport, please correct me if I’m wrong.)br /br /That having been said, I think what Lee meant is that there are a lot private universities in the USA, the tuition fees are the highest worldwide, and that the health insurance coverage is despite being entirely privatized and not mandatory also more costly and less efficient than in the EU. The consequences of that and the conclusions to draw could fill books, and are hardly appropriately taken care of in that footnote.div class=”blogger-post-footer”"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother.” ~ Albert Einsteinimg width=’1′ height=’1′ src=’http://res1.blogblog.com/tracker/22973357-3542682633060388571?l=backreaction.blogspot.com’//div