The Collective

The University of New Haven Economics Collective is an online space where faculty, students, and business industry leaders can connect and network by sharing content, whether it be report analysis, political commentary, or anything else on their mind. Members can comment on each other’s posts, creating a meaningful and enriching dialogue that extends beyond the traditional classroom educational experience. In the Collective, all members are economists, whether the poster is a freshman student or a Nobel Prize winner. The lines of stature are blurred through the medium of the internet, leading to more thoughtful and genuine discussions. These moments of connectivity construct social capital, which helps build up the Economics Department as more than an office of the University of New Haven, rather making it a community of people who care for one another beyond the academic setting. The Collective has already been used as a method of surveying and will be used as such in the future to further employ the method of using the wisdom of crowds.

The following titles are just a glimpse of content shared on the collective. Visit the Collective at www.universityofnewhaveneconlab.org/forum

Are Electric Cars Really Green?

Claude Chereau, June 3, 2021 Electric cars are being promoted around the world as being ‘greener’ than their fossil-fuel counterparts. While electric cars do not indeed emit CO2, we need to take a whole-life cycle approach and answer the following questions: 1) how is the electricity used to power the cars generated? 2) how is the lithium to make the batteries extracted? 3) how are the batteries recycled? This post addresses only the 2nd question.

A Great Example of Mainstream Media Choking On Their Own Words and Preconceived Beliefs.

David Sacco, June 4, 2021 This Vanity Fair article provides a great timeline and synopsis of how the Wuhan Lab leak theory has gone from conspiracy theory to a better than even money odds explanation of how COVID-19 actually started. It will be left to economists and future historians to decide how much Trump Derangement Syndrome will wind up costing our global economy with this being a prime example. For those of us old enough to remember the indisputable evidence presented as proof of Iraq's WMDs which is the greater oxymoron?