I am working, in parallel, on revising my manuscript, titled ‘Climbing the right hill – an evolutionary approach to the European market of electricity’, on the one hand, and on preparing catchy, interesting paths of teaching for the summer semester, at the university, on the other hand. As for the former, you can read more in my last two updates, namely in ‘Still some juice in facts’, and in ‘As it is ripe, I can harvest’. In this update, I will develop on that path of work, but first, I am sharing a piece of educational structure I came up with for my workshops in Macroeconomics, with the students of 1st year, Bachelor, major International Relations, at my home university, namely the Andrzej Frycz-Modrzewski Krakow University, Krakow, Poland. Below, I am copying the description of training assignment such as it is being presented to my students.
For graduating workshops in Macroeconomics, Summer semester 2021, you will prepare just one, structured assignment. You can consider it as a follow up on the business plan you prepared in the course of Microeconomics.
You can take your business plan from the course of Microeconomics, or you can choose one of the business plans specifically provided as case studies for this assignment, namely:
>> https://discoversocialsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Switch-Park-Business-Plan.docx
>> https://discoversocialsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Peerket-Business-Plan.docx
>> https://discoversocialsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Foodies-Business-Plan.docx
Pick ONE business plan, once again: your own or one of the three provided as library. Review the customers’ profile in that particular business concept. Who are the customers? Are they individuals (households) or are they institutional (firms, public institutions etc.)?
Now, imagine the whole market of businesses such as the one described.
Those customers have a budget to finance the purchase of goods named in that business plan.
What other goods do they finance with the same budget?
What stream of cash does that budget come from? Do they pay for those goods with their current income, or do they pay out of their capital base (i.e. from their assets)?
Now, take the entire population of those customers. Their AGGREGATE budgets represent aggregate demand, and that demand is derived from a stream of income, or from a capital base. In your analysis, at this point, phrase it out explicitly: ‘The market for this business concept is based on aggregate demand coming from the group of customers ABCD, and the value of that aggregate demand depends on the aggregate stream of income Y, or on the aggregate amount of assets X.’
Place that business plan in the context of the national economies whose macroeconomic profiles are provided in the file attached to this assignment (https://discoversocialsciences.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Data-for-work-with-business-plans.xlsx). Those national economies are: Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, France, Italy, Latvia.
Use exhaustively, in an informed, articulate manner, the data provided in the attached file, to develop an analysis and answer the following question: ‘Which of these countries makes the best macroeconomic environment for the implementation of this specific business plan? Which of the countries is the worst macroeconomic environment in that respect? Provide, using the data at hand, informed argumentation for your choice’.
Provide your answer in the form of a business report, something like an extended, macroeconomic analysis for the business plan you took on studying the macroeconomic environment for. As you will be working with the data supplied to assists your answer, you will go through the following macroeconomic variables:
| Subject Descriptor | Units | Scale |
| Gross domestic product, constant prices | National currency | Billions |
| Gross domestic product, constant prices | Percent change | |
| Gross domestic product, current prices | National currency | Billions |
| Gross domestic product, current prices | U.S. dollars | Billions |
| Gross domestic product, current prices | Purchasing power parity; international dollars | Billions |
| Gross domestic product, deflator | Index | |
| Gross domestic product per capita, constant prices | National currency | Units |
| Gross domestic product per capita, constant prices | Purchasing power parity; 2017 international dollar | Units |
| Gross domestic product per capita, current prices | National currency | Units |
| Gross domestic product per capita, current prices | U.S. dollars | Units |
| Gross domestic product per capita, current prices | Purchasing power parity; international dollars | Units |
| Gross domestic product based on purchasing-power-parity (PPP) share of world total | Percent | |
| Implied PPP conversion rate | National currency per current international dollar | |
| Total investment | Percent of GDP | |
| Gross national savings | Percent of GDP | |
| Inflation, average consumer prices | Index | |
| Inflation, average consumer prices | Percent change | |
| Inflation, end of period consumer prices | Index | |
| Inflation, end of period consumer prices | Percent change | |
| Volume of imports of goods and services | Percent change | |
| Volume of Imports of goods | Percent change | |
| Volume of exports of goods and services | Percent change | |
| Volume of exports of goods | Percent change | |
| Unemployment rate | Percent of total labor force | |
| Population | Persons | Millions |
| Current account balance | U.S. dollars | Billions |
| Current account balance | Percent of GDP |
Workshops will largely consist in explaining those macroeconomic concepts, and I strongly encourage you to study their meaning in a textbook, and in online resources. The simplest way is to type each of these categories into a Google search and study the results of that search.
Your assignment largely consists in developing credible statements of the type: ‘Country A seems to make the best macroeconomic environment for this business, because its macroeconomic variables X, Y and Z take values x, y and z’.
Now, teaching content shared, I am returning to revising my manuscript. I think I pretty much nailed down, in the last update (‘As it is ripe, I can harvest’), the core of the reproducible method of research which I want to present. As I am working on phrasing out the finer details of that reproducible method, and position it vis a vis the corresponding theory, whilst instrumenting it with a computational model, I feel like returning to questions, which the journal Applied Energy requires to address in my cover letter. I remind those questions below.
>> (1) what is the novelty of this work?
>> (2) is the paper appealing to a popular or scientific audience?
>> (3) why the author thinks the paper is important and why the journal should publish it?
I start with a tentative answer to the last one, about the importance of that research, as well as about the usefulness of publishing it. When my research gets published, two things happen. Firstly, it is being peer-reviewed, and is published only after a specific ritual is accomplished. The ritual starts with editor of the journal judging the paper ripe for asking other scientists to review it, usually 2 or 3 of them. That release from the editor to the reviewers results in the reviewers having a go at the paper, and assessing whether it is acceptable at all, and what kind of critical remarks they have. Generally, the reviewers are not expected to be indiscriminately enthusiastic about the paper. The type of answer to expect from them is the ‘yes, but…’ type. Once they provide their reviews of my manuscript in that form, I am expected to revise once again, whilst explicitly addressing the critical remarks from reviewers in a separate statement. At this stage, I revise in a ‘yes, but…’ style. I am like: ‘Yes, at this point, you are right, prof. YUTOONJJK, and thus I am changing my stance accordingly, but at this other point, with all the due respect, I am holding my ground and here is why I am doing so: …’. This phase of revision is tricky. Technically, I could change everything in response to critical remarks, but it wouldn’t be the same paper anymore. In order to remain in the same scientific territory, I need, first of all, to study the same facts. Thus, my empirical base remains the same. The essential points of my method should stay in place as well, I just might need to support it with more convincing an argumentation. What I can really change in response to reviewers’ criticism, are some details in my calculations, and the interpretation I give to the results of my empirical investigation.
The first aspect of having my paper published is precisely my readiness, and my ability, to go gracefully and convincingly through that ritual of peer-review, and my response thereto. If I think that my paper deserves publishing, I indirectly suggest that when it passes the ritualised dialogue of peer-review, everybody involved will be better off, i.e. the scientific community will benefit from other scientists criticising me, and me responding to their criticism through a polite, informed statement that I am holding my ground, with maybe some tiny concessions. Another aspect of publication is the capacity, for me, to cite that publication of mine in the future. Why would I do it? Mostly when I will be applying for funding, it is frequently welcome to prove that the research I will intend to conduct is relevant, important, and I am not (entirely) mad in my methods of running that research. In other words, when my paper gets published, it gives me scientific firepower to develop on the same stream of research. That, in turn, requires me to define an acceptably coherent stream of research, for one, and that stream should have potential for development.
All in all, when I claim that the journal which I am submitting to should publish my paper, I should convincingly prove that my research can enrich the scientific community, and it has strong potential for future development. Those general remarks phrased out, I can apply that line of thinking to my manuscript.
Policies pertinent to energy systems, especially in the environmental perspective, frequently assume that significant idiosyncrasies in individual agents or in political entities (countries, regions etc.) are bad for progress, and they should be equalized. In other words, public policies should be equalizers, or redistributors of gains from the technological race. I could notice that theoretical stance in one of the articles I have recently quoted, namely in ‘The energy metabolism of countries: Energy efficiency and use in the period that followed the global financial crisis’. Energy Policy, 139, 111304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2020.111304 (2020), byprofessor Valeria Andreoni. Still, from the management point of view, or from the perspective of the new institutional school in economics, this is not necessarily true. If we want quick, deeply transformative technological change, we need a true technological race, with true winners and true losers. Equality does not really serve efficient adaptation.
I think that public policies supposed to drive rapid technological change should stimulate technological race, and stimulate inequality of outcomes in that race. In order to adapt to serious s**t, we need to experiment with many alternative ways of action. The question is: how exactly can we do it? How can governments experiment? In order to address that question, there is another one to answer: how exactly does that experimentation occur? What exactly is happening when we collectively experiment with ourselves, as a society? I think that the methodology I present in my paper creates a small opening up and into that realm of research: simulating social and technological change as a process of learning by trial and error.
Summing partly up that intellectual meandering of mine, I think that my paper deserves publishing because my method of studying social and technological change – as a manifestation of learning in collectively intelligent social structures, which adapt to stressors by creating many alternative versions of themselves and assessing their fitness to cope with said stressors – allows conceptualizing public policies and business strategies, in the sector of energy, as a process of heuristic, adaptive experimentation rather than as a linear path towards a determined end-state.
As I have spat this one out, I think that I need to combine that manuscript, namely ‘Climbing the right hill – an evolutionary approach to the European market of electricity’, such as it is now, with two others, unpublished as well: ‘Behavioural absorption of Black Swans: simulation with an artificial neural network’, for one, and ‘The labour-oriented, collective intelligence of ours: Penn Tables 9.1 seen through the eyes of a neural network’, for two. They all operate on overlapping datasets, and they show different aspects of the same essential method.
The next question to address in my cover letter is the target audience of my paper. Is my article made for the popular audience, or rather for the scientific one? I am tempted to say: ‘for both’. Yet, I know this is a tricky question. It really means asking ‘Is my article refined enough, in terms of scientific method, to impress and influence my fellow scientists, or is it rather an interesting piece, detached from the main body of science, and served to non-scientific people in a tasty sauce?’. At the end of the day, I want to write it both ways, but the latter one will go down better as a book, later on. The form it has now, i.e. that of an article, my idea is addressed to a scientific audience, as a slightly provocative opening on an interesting perspective. Precisely, the deep intuition that I am opening a path of research rather than closing one, makes me stay at the level of short scientific form.
As I have provisionally walked myself through the cover letter which I should address to the editor of the journal Applied Energy , I come back to the structure I should give to the revised paper: ‘Introduction’, ‘Material and Methods’, ‘Theory’, ‘Calculation’, ‘Results’, ‘Discussion’, ‘Conclusion’, ‘Data availability’, ‘Glossary’, ‘Appendices’, Highlights, and Graphical Abstract.
As I intend to combine three manuscripts into one, the combined highlights of those three would be:
>> Public policies and business strategies can be studied as adaptive change in a collectively intelligent structure.
>> Markov chains of states are the general mathematical foundation of such an approach.
>> A simple perceptron can be used as computational tool for simulating social and technological change in real world.
>> The method presented allows discovering distinct, collectively pursued orientations of whole societies, and distinct types of collective learning.
>> Empirical findings suggest collective orientation on optimizing the labour market, rather than direct orientation on transforming the energy base of societies.
>> That collective orientation seems being pursued through an almost perfectly cyclical process of learning, where phases of abundant experimentation are interspersed with periods of relative homeostasis.
