(Shanghai, China) Working to solve poverty…I hope

I have not been updating my blog regularly since arriving at Penn as there is simply so much I want to do. In addition to the heavy workload for the Joseph Wharton Scholars class I am taking, and the Huntsman class of Comparative Capitalist Systems, the intense Management 100 class for Wharton and my Math and Chinese classes, I am attending two additional courses that interests me greatly. One of them is ‘Contemporary North Korea’ , a series of seminars led by the eminent Dr. Cameron Hurst whom I met at the Korea Conference in Seoul.

The other course is
URBAN UNIVERSITY-COMMUNITY RELATIONSHIPS (BFS)
Ira Harkavy & Lee Benson

The new Penn curriculum developed by the seminar would have as a significant component, thematic, problem-solving clusters, i.e., interrelated, cross-disciplinary, complementary sets of courses designed to stimulate and empower students to produce, not simply consumer, societally-useful knowledge. By societally-useful knowledge, we mean knowledge actively used to solve universal strategic problems of democracy and society, schooling and society, health and society, poverty and society, environment and society, culture and society, etc., as those universal problems manifest themselves locally at Penn and in West Philadelphia/Philadelphia.

This course by Ira Harkavy, director of the Center for Community Partnership appeals to me, as it attempts to apply academic thinking to the solution of problems. It underlies my belief that academic knowledge has practical and transformational value. In presenting a paper at the World Bank Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics in Tokyo, I chose to focus half the paper on my experience setting up an NGO, and the other half on an academic analysis of my approach, as I believed in the value derived from combining the empirical with the academic. I hope to apply this approach in West Philly and contribute to an impoverished community; a impoveresihment accentuated by contrast against the predominantly wealthy kids who populate Penn or any other Ivy League institution.

In addition, I am writing three research papers and planning to work with a professor on a research project. One research paper is for my Comparative Capitalist Systems class, where I hope to analyze path dependency as an explanation of certain political-economic outcomes in Northeast Asia (at this stage, I have only a rough idea of my precise thesis). The other paper focuses on new financial instruments that can benefit development in developing economies with large inflows of remittances, an idea that I became interested in after reading the World Bank’s Global Development Finance report. I am also writing another paper on the economic and social impact of increasing population density for a conference in Germany which I attended in 2005 and which I might attend again next year.

I will also either become a research assistant to McDermott, who works on development, or with Martin Asher, who needs help on a macro-forecasting model. Although development is my primary interest, I was just starting on a macro-forecasting model when I worked for Manu Bhaskaran, former Chief Economist and Strategist for Societe Generale, and would like to continue working on something of the same intellectual vein.

My last activity will be to get round to organizing a Philosophy in Film society with Professor Karen Detlefsen’s help. I really enjoyed my Proseminar, which involved watching movies and discussing the philosophical themes contained in those movies, and promised her that I would find like-minded people to organize further sessions.