Professor James Moody of Ohio State University recently completed a fascinating study, mapping the romantic and sexual relationships of students at a high school over the course of 18 months. Although there were not many students who had many partners,

The romantic and sexual network at the school created long chains of connections that spread out through the community, with few places where students directly shared the same partners with each other. But they were indirectly linked, partner to partner to partner. One component of the network linked 288 students – more than half of those who were romantically active at the school – in one long chain. (See figure for a representation of the network.)

Granted, to be in the chain, sexual intercourse is not required. Nevertheless, this has profound implications in regard to the spread of STDs. Because students often think that they are acting non-promiscuously by only having one or two partners over eighteen months, they underestimate their potential risk for getting STDs. Because if those one or two partners happened to be linked in a long chain of people, and one of those people happens to have an STD, there is a real chance that a “non-promiscuous” student could end up with an STD.

Well, my Labor Market Economics class got entirely canceled for the semester, due to the professor having an illness. So I got placed in an independent study in the economics department at William and Mary. I’m actually pretty excited about it, because I can basically study anything I want.

If you read this blog regularly, you probably know that I’m interested in doing something related to environmental economics. I’ve come up with a few ideas of topics to focus on, but I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to decide. So I thought I’d post some of the topic ideas I had on here and see if any readers think they’d be interesting for me to study. Of course I will post what I learn on gimme-five.

1. Economics of Climate Change in General, in particular, in relation to the discount rate. (a large discount rate means environmental damage in the future doesn’t matter so much today in terms of present value, for example)

2. Comparison of Environmental incentives used to reduce CO2 emissions or improve ecosystems (i.e. Gas Tax v. Permit Trading)

3. Feasibility of international enforcement of climate regulations from an economic context.

Consider the concept of a minimum page requirement. Commonly, a professor will assign a term paper to a student, and that term paper will have a list of requirements. One of these will be a minimum page requirement. In other words, the term paper must be at least X pages long before the student is allowed to turn it in.

Minimum page requirements are silly. In the real world (the “working” world), the name of the game is getting an idea across clearly and succinctly. Yet students go through elementary, middle, high school, and college being taught that their ideas are not complete unless they happen to fill up at least ten pages of paper, double spaced, 12″, Times New Roman font. Better to fill pages with what we students call “BS” than to turn in a paper two pages shy of the minimum requirement.

Granted, I’m a student, so I haven’t experienced the real world. But from what I hear, in the real world, people are rewarded, not punished, for getting an idea across in one page rather than three. So perhaps more teachers and professors should consider instituting maximum page limits rather than minimum ones. Minimum page limits are fine as guidelines, but creating hard and fast rules for how long a paper must be doesn’t make anyone into a better writer.