Economic Club of SB 1st Event

The first event/meeting of the Economic Club of Santa Barbara was a success. Although we didn’t have as many people as we expected, the event had a good flow and was interesting. 

UCSB Visiting Professor Shinder Thandi, an expert of Political Economy of Development, started off by talking about the positive force of Globalization for about 15 minutes; he was followed by SBCC and Ventura College Economics Professor Phillip Bohan, who rebutted with a discussion of some of the negative consequences resulting from the issue of Globalization. Finally, SBCC Geography Professor Jennifer Bernstein gave a PowerPoint presentation on the role that Globalization plays in our world and the importance of space in the field of Economics. 

A picture taken in a sweatshop in China

The discussion proceeded with an analysis of pros and cons of sweatshops: for example, on  the one hand, sweatshops workers are paid low wages to work long hours and in very poor working conditions; sweatshops often employ child labor, and have many negative connotations attached to them. On the other hand, however, it is true that most of the times sweatshop workers take the job voluntarily, which means that although the job conditions are poor and the pay is minimal, this situation is still better than anything else available in the area; some would also make the case that $1 in China is worth more than $1 in Santa Barbara, a claim that suggests that the impressively little pay is not actually that insignificant.

Left to right: Prof. Bohan, Prof. Bernstein, Prof. Thandi, and Sebastian, Club President

I think this is a very controversial topic, which makes it interesting as a result. Eliminating sweatshops would mean eliminating jobs for the poor people who have no other options than accepting the bad working conditions offered by sweatshops. Improving working conditions would mean that clothing and apparel giants would not be giant, and probably would have to pay more for your Nike shoes and Under Armor shorts. The discussion continued to include the impact of Globalization on the environment, but by then I had already left to go to my class. On Thursdays, I have Macroeconomics lecture from 6PM to 9PM, so I had to miss over half of the event.

The students who did come seemed to be interested and payed attention

Overall, although we had less people attending the discussion that we had planned, the event was a great success because it was organized with tight deadlines, by a group of students, and most importantly it was the very first event of a newly started club. I think it’s great that we were able to get three speakers be our guests, and now we have some room to improve our marketing strategy for our future events. 

Making sure we had all the needed materials for the event.

Some of the ideas I will bring to the table when the club leadership meets on Tuesday are to consider holding future events of Wednesdays rather than Thursdays (because most SBCC students don't have class on Fridays, so they are less likely to stick around on Thursday night), raise enough funds to offer coffee and cookies at the event, plan to involve the Economics, Political Science, and other related departments by asking the professors to allow us to advertise the event in their class (i.e. at the beginning of lecture), and perhaps even considering offering extra-credit for attending our events. I also would like to reach out to UCSB students by promoting our club and events on the UCSB campus, which would require we turn to our connections and try to involve UCSB students in our club, The Economic Club of Santa Barbara— not just SBCC Econ Club.

I'll catch you in my next post. As always,

A presto!

- Fede