Back to School?

I have a Bachelors degree from NTSU, now UNT.

Big deal.

Although I took economics, and money & banking classes at UTA and NTSU, I'd love to either retake them, or take some additional classes on the subject, as I fear I may have slept through some lectures, or maybe have forgotten some things. It has, after all, been a few years.

I remember reading Lee Iacocca's eponymous book of the early '80s, in which he criticized the migration of our manufacturing infrastructure to overseas producers. At the time, the conventional wisdom, not shared by the then-CEO of Chrysler, was that we were becoming a "service economy", moving away from the industrial/manufacturing age. At the time, some of it, to me anyway, seemed to be semantics, as in a manufacturer saying it provided the service of assembling widgets. But, over time, we did in fact do less manufacturing, or assembly, whatever term you use.

In college, I was taught that an economy needs many inputs to succeed: Capital, raw materials, real estate (before virtual businesses), educated/skilled workers, access to transportation and to markets (customers). Individual businesses weigh these factors, as well as climate, and cultural/entertainment opportunities, in deciding where to locate their stores, factories, or headquarters.

The underlying assumption of the heirarchy of economies seemed to be that they progressed from agrarian to industrial to service to knowledge-based.

At the turn of the millennium, I worked selling software. Intellectual property development can be very fascinating, and profitable. You write the code, then sell it a zillion times, hopefully reinvesting some of your profits back into R&D to keep your product current. In the late '90s, this was all the rage as we raced to become an "information economy". Venture capital was showered on those who could produce even a nominal business plan, irrespective of deliverables or profits. Having come from the banking business, I recall looking askance at such practices and being told: "You just don't understand the new economy." True enough, but said 'new economy' hit a brick wall in 2000-2001, as investors started demanding to see returns, and 9/11 didn't help matters. Gradually, of course, the market restored sanity.

There's a book called "Fire Your Customers", extolling the virtues of culling unprofitable customers. The basic premise is sound, but I suspect many practitioners get it wrong, as they cut the bottom 10% of their client roster every year - works great if you're growing at 11% or better, but if not, you're likely gradually marginalizing yourself into obscurity. I've heard lots of otherwise intelligent people use the much-abused "80/20 rule", usually with much [undeserved] reverence, to justify this or that idiocy.

But back to economics. As we 'progress' into higher forms of economic activity, are we not like the balloon which is squeezed on one end, creating a bulge on the other end. This of course could beget a whole blog on Pareto efficiencies and optimization theory. With over 6 billion people on the planet, and relatively finite natural resources, can we forever count on there being sources of cheaper labor and raw materials? Or will we someday find that the economies we've helped establish and strengthen are now self-sufficient and we, having marginalized our work habits, we are like the final investors in a Ponzi scheme?

Like I said, I'd like to take some courses to brush up on economics.