Post 8 Conflicts

When I was a sophomore, I lived with three girls. I did not know they partied girls until I moved in. At that time, I was actually looking for girls who are quite, friendly, and good at cooking. One of the previous tenants intentionally lied to me in order to sublease one bedroom to me. After I moved in, my nightmare began. First, all of them are sorority girls, so they would regularly bring sorority girls into our apartment such as cooking together, doing homework and talking gossips. Actually, no matter what they originally planned to do, eventually all the activities would end up with gossips. Hence, you could keep hearing laughing or screaming at the very loud voice. I tried to talk to my roommates much times about the noise they made which would interrupt my studies. They always replied we will try to turn down our voice next time. Unsurprisingly, the same situation kept recurring and nothing had been changed. I had to go to library or friends place to get away from those gossip girls.

Later on, things became worse and worse. They started to hold party almost every Friday, which really drove me crazy. Since I was not favor of the party and drinks, I like to maintain a regular sleeping cycle. Most time, I would go bed by the 12 at night. However, this was just the time they started to pregame and warm up. Sometimes, they even drank until 4 am, since everyone was drunk over, they would shout very loud, dancing, singing or even do some crazier things. I could not fall asleep at all. Finally, I opened my door, and shout at them “getting out of my apartment, the party is over!” I need to sleep! My roommates knew I was really mad this time, so they asked their friends to leave our apartment right after I pissed off. On the next day, I decided to have a serious conversation to them and set up rules, “In the future, we could only invite friends to come to our apartments during the day, and they need to leave by 8 pm. No party at our apartment. If you guys host a party again, I would call the policy. “Absolutely, it is hard for them to accept no parties anymore. They kept argue with me and said what about once a month. I rejected. They kept telling me they were sorority members, so they need to hold events regularly to maintain a relationship with insiders. We kept negotiate the rules and everyone made a concession. In the end, I allowed them to host a party once per semester. And they need to clean up the trash after party.

I have to say this entire year is miserable for me. I could not sleep well. I do not have a quite study environment. Living condition is also terrible since those girls were so lazy to clean up the trash. I was the only one who threw away the trash and clean the living room most. They would only clean it when I was mad and strongly complain the tidy issue. Unsurprisingly, my grades dropped very significantly at that year. From my perspective, conflicts are inevitable and exist ubiquitously. Based on these two examples, I chose to go to the library as my solution to get a quiet environment for studying. Thus, I am the one make a concession. In the second case, when they host a party at the midnight, I could not avoid conflicts by just leaving the house. Hence, I had to talk with them, and negotiate the rules, and find a compromise that everyone could accept. In the future, I would dig into more information and do more research to know the roommate better in advance, which would help me to make a wise decision next time.

Post 7 Team work

After reading “how to get the rich to share the marbles” article, I think the result of this experiment could not convince me. At least, it could not rely on those restricted circumstances to reflect the whole population’s “sharing idea”. Even though the experiment chose three-year- old children, who seem to make the decision base on their instinct, as objects of study, actually there is an important factor would significantly affect the way they make decision – family education. Recently, there are several popular Parent-child TV shows in China. For every season, five popular singers, actors and athletics father will bring their kids to complete all different type of tasks. Those kids are normally from 2-8 years old average about 4 years old. They are required to complete the challenging tasks either independently or cooperating with other kids. Of course, there are many rewards wait for the first winner who complete the tasks faster than the others. The interesting thing is that most time those winners would share the gifts with other kids right after they got the gifts. They feel satisfied by sharing. Not only gifts, they would love to share any delicious food or drinks with other kids. Why? Obviously, family education plays a significant role here. Even they are still a little kid, their parents have already started to teach them the idea of sharing. Parents also told them older kids need to take care of younger kids. Those moral value has already implanted into kid’s minds. Another important reason for those kids loving shares is that they all come from rich families, which could afford most things they like, which actually make them less selfish. To illustrate, a tasty cake might be very precious to the very poor or rural area’s kids but just a normal appetite to those rich kids. They really don't care to share it or even just give it away. Hence, I really think “how to get the rich to share” is not a core problem that need to be addressed.

In addition, I think “fair” is a relative definition, not an absolute definition. Same distribution may sound fair to you but not to everyone else. The claim announced by President Obama that “we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules” may sound fair at first appearance and seems very humanity. However, if you take further consideration, this claim actually is not fair at all. Why? From my perspective, if everyone gets exactly equal amount wealth in an economy, the citizens guided by this type of ideal policy would lose the incentive to work hard because no matter how much efforts you made, the amount of effort you get is always fixed. Especially when the government tries to solve the wealth inequality by taxing rich people to subsidize poor people, this policy already failed to achieve fairness. If the fairness is defined as people deserve to get the amount of efforts they made, then it is unfair to tax on high-income family who might contribute more to this society or works very hard to earn all that wealth. Just take a second to think about the welfare system in Europe, initially government was trying to improve the poor families or unemployment by giving them relief funds that collected by a high tax. Later on, some people found that even they work hard regularly, probably their after-tax weekly salaries is less than those who did not work at all by getting the social welfare. Naturally, they would have a lot of complaints and quit the job and rely on social benefit as well. For high-income family, they might lose an incentive to earn more money since once they passed certain tax threshold, the tax rate would be very high, which actually damage their benefit.

For team work, it is always hard to divide work equally. The most common situation is that someone would contribute more than the others. Normally, a more competent student would finish the challenging part which requires more time or more research on it, and leave the rest to other team members, but everyone gets some grade in the end. Is it fair? It depends on. If the more competent student thinks he could complete the challenging part more outstanding or effectively which save the whole group work time and improve team work performance, everyone gets a better grade as a whole, he thinks it is fair, then this situation would be fair. If he thinks everyone should get exactly the same amount of work, regardless the hardness of the work, in the end results probably won’t be as satisfied as the previous situation, he thinks this type of situation is fair, then it could be fair as well. No matter what kinds of decisions we made, everyone agrees on it and accept the possible results, then it would be fair.

To restatement my point, fairness is a relative moral value, no one should force everyone else to accept his or her own perspective as the sole answer. The moral value would change as the time pass by. Something people deeply believed fair in the past, it would probably be unacceptable to the contemporary people or future generation. A good policy is not achieving goals by sacrificing a group of people to benefiting the other group. It should create incentive value to the society as a whole to work on it.

Post 6 Income risks

Currently, due to global economic recession, it is highly competitive to get a job after graduation. As an international student major in Accounting, it is even harder to get a job because international students need employer sponsor Visa, which means employer need to pay additional money to hire non-citizen employees. Obviously, students from College of Business are not a scarce human resource. In the real business industry, companies generally will not hire students only from College of Business but students from all different kinds of majors. More specifically, accounting firms would hire candidates major in computer science, economics, psychology, law and so on. The fact is that even students have been studied four years in Science of Accountancy, they are still not qualified to perform financial statements and consulting service for the clients. All accounting firms have to train freshman for couple months, then we could start our real career. This is the main reason why it is very hard for College of Business students to find a job because they are so easily to be replaced by other candidates from a different academic background. Generally, the annual salary of Big Four accounting firms’ entry level would be around $50,000. In order to be a more qualified candidate, it is very helpful to pass the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) since the accounting firms would prefer to hire students who already passed the CPA which do not need firm to pay extra fees to support current employees completing this certification program. One of my friend, who already got a job in Deloitte, told me for entry-level employees who passed the CPA license would get ￥300 than those who do not pass each month. Although to be qualified for taking CPA exam requires 150 credits and over $1000 application fee, eventually those extra education fees would be payback through long-term career life, and CPA license also make you more competitive in the future no matter which area in business industry. Overall, it worth to invest education fee right now in improving my human capital for future. That is why I spend one more year in graduate school to earn 30 more credits for qualifying taking CPA exam. Therefore, receiving higher level education and passing certification program is one way I used to minimize income risk in the future.

Because after tax accountant’s annual income would be tight for a living, it is very necessary to save money and reduce living expenditures. From a consumption perspective, I apply for Social Security Number(SSN) in order to build my own credit history from now on. Since with an SSN, I could apply for a credit card which have 1% cash back on all transactions. In addition, I would also start to deposit money into reserve or growth account rather than checking account for extra money to earn minor interests every month. Without SSN, I would only deposit money into checking which does not earn any interests. Moreover, a good credit history could lower borrowing rates such as mortgage rate, car loan, and potential extension of payments date in the future. There are many benefits that we could take to reduce expenditures. For example, with credit history, you can apply a Macy’s membership card, then you can get 20% off for every purchase you made. Not only Macy’s, Amazon, Target, Apple, Discover etc., they all provide a similar benefit which could help us reduce consumption costs. Furthermore, whenever I made an online purchase, I always use rebate websites which could give cash back depends on different online stores. For example, Amazon would give 3% cash back rebate in most items, eBay is 1%, Walmart is 2% rebate. Hence, it is also very simple and effective to cut the costs by purchasing online through rebate websites. 

Saving and investment also play significant roles in diversifying income risk. Normally, I would plan the monthly expenditure ahead and record all transactions into excel to monitor the expense. Typically, I would spend 1/3 on groceries, 1/3 rent and utilities, and 1/3 on saving for an emergency or future use. For instance, if I am going to buy a car or house, it would be a good idea to start to save money month by month, rather than preparing a large lump sum at one time. Some of my friends, even start to open an investing accounts in the stock market with the money they saved. One of my friend who already earned 200,000 dollars during college life and purchase a BMW by himself. Of course, he borrowed the initial investment from his parents at zero cost. For students like me who are not quite familiar with stock market, I would rather be more conservative on investing money on stock market, I’d like to pay the insurance such as health insurance, dental insurance or pension insurance to levied future living pressure. It is extremely expensive to get health service in U.S. compared that to China. Definitely, it is very important to maintain a good health like healthy diets and regular exercise every day to improve our immune system.

Overall, my strategies to mitigate income risks would be pursuit of high level of education, completion of certification problems, establishment of credit history, reduction of expenditure through cash back programs, long-term saving plans, investment on insurance and investment, and maintaining healthy conditions.