Alice Rivlin ECON 490 Fall 2019

Illinibucks can be applied to a bunch of activities on campus. Since U of I has a large campus with tens of thousands of people in total, demand is always more than supply and waiting in lines is so common. At the beginning of each semester, the lines in the bookstore are always too long; since the Starbucks on Green street closed during this summer, the lines in the Starbucks in the bookstore and Union become way longer than usual; football games and concerts in State Farm Center are always crowded, and it’s difficult to buy tickets sometimes; register for classes is a big thing to every student, and to successfully register all the classes one would like to can be hard, or “impossible”. I would like to spend my Illinibucks on registering classes as dearly as possible, since the quantity supply of econ courses are relatively insufficient compared to the quantity demand (the number of econ students). When I registered for courses this semester in March or April, I failed to select my...

There are various team configurations being discussed in B&D: one boss, dual authority, Simple hierarchy, circle network, and all-channel network. One boss, by the definition, is that all individuals in the team follow the one and only leader in the team. The leader holds all the control and authority in his/her hand. Dual authority means the team divided into two sub-groups with a sub-leader who can supervise the group members and report everything to the leader. In this case, the leader only directly contacts with the two sub-leaders. Simple hierarchy has the same number of divisions in the group, whereas only one sub-leader communicating between the members and the boss on the top of the structure, supervising all the members, and sending feedback to the boss. Circle network means there is no leader necessarily existing in the structure and members all connect to some of the others in the group. The problem with such a team structure is that it takes a longer t...

Organizations can be very different from each other by their sizes, operation modes, and industries (areas). Companies are the most common type of organizations in general, but schools and colleges are organizations, and so are hospitals. Different types of organizations require different ways of regulation. I have only one internship experience as a psychopathology assistant in the research lab in a mental hospital in Beijing. I did literature translation, proofreading, and outpatient service shadowing. The hospital was well organized under the regulation of a decisive director. However, my director was so busy all the time that she sometimes failed to communicate and assign tasks efficiently with her subordinates. I had no tasks assigned in the first week at all because my director attended meetings and conferences all the time. She did not communicate with me of her expectations or goals, and she did not respond to my emails with any questions I held. I was so lost and confused, a...

Alice Mitchell Rivlin (March 4th, 1931 to May 14th, 2019) was an American economist known for her contribution to economics and different fields. She was born in Philidelphia, moved to Europe when she was working on the Marshall Plan, which was created to help reconstruct the economies of Western European countries after World War 2. Although she got her bachelor's degree in arts, she stepped in the economics eventually with a Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in 1958.  As written in abundant articles, Alice M. Rivlin was described as "the original economist mom," "economics intellectual," "first woman to lead to the White House budget office," and "an inspiration for generations of women economists." Back in the 1960s, the proportion of female economists was lower than 5 percent. The economics was field entirely male dominant. Has Rivlin entered the economics field with her revolutionary contributions, voice of female in economics would...