Team Production and Gift Exchange

Comparing the national economy to a machine that dispenses marbles requiring two children to pull on one string is an ok analogy, but not far reaching. In this scenario it requires both to pull a string at the same time for one child to receive one marble, and the other to receive 3. In this experiment most of the times the marbles were eventually divided evenly among both children as the children ended up sharing the marbles between each other. In the national economy some people do receive more 'marbles' than others while doing the same amount of work or even less, but then again some people do not contribute at all to the national 'marble machine' and still receive their share of marbles. Some of the people who do not contribute do have legitimate reasons not to, but others just take advantage of the system and reap the benefits.

Almost every group project that I have worked on has had at least one person who did not participate and earned a good grade for the overall project. The project that I am working on this semester for my Computer Science class has not had this kind of person so far and our team, even though we haven't been as productive as we should have, has not had these kinds of problems. We do have one person on our team that does end up doing a little more work than everyone else, because he volunteered to be the group leader when the project first started. He is in charge of submitting each part of the assignment and making sure it is handed in on time, but is not solely responsible for the content, we all contribute evenly.

On a larger scale I do agree with the authors of the article, that there has not been a national collaborative project since the 1970's and that everyone has just been grabbing as many 'marbles' as they can. Looking at personal experiences of my time on Illinois Student Senate I noticed that there is not much collaboration between the student body and their governing body either. There were several dues that each student was paying and the Student Senate was responsible for allocating it. As a team the Student Senate was not able to come up with a good use for the money, so they ended up spending on the promotion of the Student Senate, and swag items for the students to give out during basketball and football games. This is how the students got their money back from a portion of their dues. 

Income Risk: Now and in the Future

Writing this blog post late, but wanted to add to the conversation at least on here but also in class. My parents are an excellent an example of people who took immediate action of reducing income risk in the future. Having left the collapsing Soviet Union in the late 80's early 90's, they emigrated to the United States in hopes of better opportunities. My mom's formal education in the Soviet Union was in Theater Tech, where she worked in a theater in St. Petersburg after finishing school. As the Soviet Union started relaxing travel restrictions and for other personal reasons, she left the Soviet Union with my then one year old older brother.
Coming to the United States there was not much opportunity to continue working in theater, especially with the cultural and language barriers. She did however see that the technology industry was starting to develop rapidly and even though she never imagined herself working anything with computers, she enrolled in a Computer Science Masters Program at Depaul. Her determined work ethic allowed her to get her masters despite the fact that she was just learning the language and knew nothing about computers, although Computer Science as a discipline was largely different from what it is now. But this allowed her to find a relatively high paying job and learn the technology of a specific industry, in this case payroll and automatic processing (ADP) which she still holds today. It was a similar story for my dad, who was a medical doctor back in the Soviet Union, and although he didn't get a formal education here, was able to learn programming and get a tech job as well.

As for myself, this still motivates me to pursue Computer Science and programming at least as a set of transferable skills that I hope will come in handy in the future. So far I have had much success in applying these skills to side projects and even getting internships, so I hope that I will continue to have success with it. And because I went to mostly community colleges before UIUC, I have been able to work full time and be a full time student for the first 3 years of my university career and pay off semester by semester. And since I transferred to UIUC, my parents have been able to help pay for my education and expenses without me having to take out any loans for my remaining time here, which will help out greatly in my future life.