Questions and Answers of Economics For Healthcare Managers

What Is the Role of Money?
What Are the Limits to Capital Accumulation?
What Is the Proper Role of Government?
How Does the Economy Balance Supply and Demand?
How Are Wealth and Value Distributed?
What Are the Origins of Wealth and Value?
What ideas do you have to provide for a better future for all Americans and all people of the world?
What are some of the advantages that might come from a less energy-intensive lifestyle?
Do you think that GDP is an adequate measure of our wealth? Why or why not?
What are your views about the future of coal in the world economy? What factors might be especially important in influencing this?
Name five ways that food production depends upon oil.
What are some ways that we can make more jobs available for labor? What would be some good and some bad sides to that?
What is Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? Can you list them in order?
Are you an optimist or a pessimist about the future? Why? About what?
Due to the depletion of high EROI oil the economic model for the peak era, i.e., roughly 1970–2020, is much different when viewed as net rather than gross energy from oil. Why is that?
How might we best respond to a future of limited oil supplies should it occur, which seems likely?
As the EROI for a given source of oil declines how does that relate to its price?
What has been the relation between the amount of oil that is consumed in a given year and the price of that oil? What might be a reason for that?
What is the relation historically between the price of energy and discretionary spending?
If energy supplies are indeed restricted is economic growth still possible? What would be the requirements for that?
Do you think that price gives signals as to the future availability of energy? Why or why not?
Discuss some of the financial issues that were related to the “oil crises” of the 1970s.
Can you discuss financial “leverage” with respect to energy and other resources?
What is the relation of an “undulating plateau” to peak oil?
Do you think that finances are beholden to the laws of physics? Why or why not?
What was the main reason that Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman put forth for the market crash in 2008?
Have events since the publication of this book in late 2011 changed your answer to the previous question?
What events of 2008–2011 might be construed as indicating some limits to the three or four percent per year growth that the United States and much of the world had previously expected? These new
What are some of the pitfalls that await even the best possible plan that one might develop? How can citizen involvement assist in that process?
How does a prediction of land use change understand possible economic possibilities? How does that relate to land quality?
What are a few important considerations in how imports, exports, and their difference might influence our economic policies?
What is the Gini index? How does that help to put a more nuanced perspective on, for example, GDP data?
What kind of corrections need to be made for raw economic data (e.g., GDP)when examining data over time?
What are time series data? How do they help us to understand biophysical economics?
What is a simple way of translating a simple growth rate into a doubling time?For example, the United States had 300 million people growing at 1 percent a year in about the year 2000. If this 1
What kinds of issues might one want to gather data on in a biophysical assessment?
How can social, political, and economic elements be incorporated into a biophysical analysis?
Give five steps that can be followed in developing a biophysical analysis.
Give one example where biophysical economic, footprint, and energy analyses give substantially the same answer.
What is emergy analysis? How does it differ from energy analysis?
What is an ecological footprint? How does that relate to biophysical economics?
Distinguish among “environmental economics,” “ecological economics,” and“biophysical economics.”
Explain some virtues of the process of visualization of model output (as was done, e.g., for Costa Rica).
What is validation? Sensitivity analysis?How would you use them in economics?
Discuss the conceptual advantage of putting our economic models inside our models of nature vs. the opposite.
What are some of the ways in which some economists today have criticized the basic models of contemporary economics?
How can we separate myth from reality?
What is an externality?
Can you explain the apparent paradox that one can use complex mathematics only on a rather simple model?
Can you give five general types of models (Hint: One of them is computer).
What is a paradigm? Give several examples.
Give one or more examples of models that are very commonly used but that are probably incorrect.
Give one or more examples of a model that is conceptually incorrect but that nevertheless gives good predictions.
Explain how some cities were astronomical instruments.
What is the difference between an analytical solution and a numerical one?
What is the difference between something that is mathematical and something that is quantitative? Can something be both?
When speaking of a model, what do we mean by “solution”?
What is a model? Where do you find models?
What resource does Hirsch and his colleagues think is especially important to adjust to a post-peak oil society?
What is the “Cancun effect”?
What is discretionary consumption?
Explain the difference between investment and consumption?
What is the “cheese slicer” model?
What happens to pressure as an oil field matures? Why?
How much oil do we discover for each barrel that we burn?
Argue for or against the following question: the important issue is “when will we run out of petroleum.”
What is meant by the phrase “the second half of the age of oil”?
What was the experience of Cuba that allows us to understand better the role of energy in an economy?
What is the relation between EROI and the amount of, e.g., education, medical care, and culture that a society can sustain?
Explain how a nation with no energy resources invests energy to get energy.
What is the approximate proportion of our economy attributable to energy costs?
Why would environmental considerations change an estimate for EROI?
What are some typical EROIs for various fuels in the US?
Do you think that including the energy to maintain the infrastructure required to use a fuel should be included in an EROI assessment? Why or why not?
EROI can be calculated at various points, starting at the wellhead or the farm gate. Give some additional places in the energy use “food chain” where it might be useful to calculate EROI?
What are some of the precedents that led to the development of the concept of EROI? What was the role of fish?
Define the economic cost of energy.
Why do they think of net energy as a“determinant of human culture”? Do you agree?
Who were some of the pioneering thinkers about net energy?
Define net energy, energy surplus, and EROI. Are they just different ways to say the same thing?
Conventional economics is usually classified as a social science. In your opinion does economics qualify as a science? Why or why not?
In the world of conventional economics, what does rational mean? What does it mean to you?
What are the characteristics of an endeavor that qualify it as a science? Do you think conventional economics qualifies as a science? Why or why not, or where and where not?
With respect to the previous question, is this pattern of basic selfishness found in all cultures around the world?
Do you agree, from your own experience, that humans are essentially selfish or at least self-regarding? Or does it depend upon the circumstances?
Why is economics usually considered a social rather than a biophysical science?What is your view?
If the equations of economics are often complex, why are they frequently described using analytical approaches?
Analytical techniques are best suited to what kind of scientific problems?
Distinguish between analytical and numeric approaches to solving mathematical equations.
What does validation mean? Sensitivity analysis?
How does “finite difference” relate to calculus?
Define calculus in terms of something familiar in your everyday life.
Define econometrics.
How is a correlation different from a function?
What is an algorithm?
Give three examples of nonlinear functions or relations.
What does linear mean? Can you give an example of something that is linear?
What does “is a function of” mean?
What is the difference between constants and variables?
Under what circumstances is analytical mathematics most useful?

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