Why I'm not an economist

One of the things I did when I was studying for my exams was making a list of great people I would invite to my imaginary birthday party. Sometimes I'm really thankful for exams because such an exercise won't be excusable under any other circumstances. I looked over the list to see how many economists were on it. Zero. Musicians, authors, actors, physicists, comedians, cartoonists, artists and chefs but no economists. I had only considered two and chose to exclude them, not just because my list was restricted to 25 people, but also because I thought they would bring the party down. 


And that's when I realised that I would never be cool enough to get invited to my own party. 

Mostly Harmless Econometrics: the Voice of Marvin

I never wanted to exist in this Econometrics universe. Indeed, when it was first created, it was considered a bad idea by many. But it does exist and life in it is dull, dreary and depressing. You’d think someone with the capacity for such alliteration would be appreciated. Did they recognise my talent? Of course they didn’t. They left me stewing in a miserable mass of regression equations for 6 months. My only friend was youtube, a window to a fictitious universe far less depressing than my own. One day my internet connection died.

Vocabulary larger than the data collection problems involved in a medium-scale field experiment and they ask me to run data through Stata. I’m just a disregarded student who must study things that she doesn’t need to know so that she can get a job that she doesn’t want to do. Call that foresight? Because I don’t.

I spent 6 months rehearsing excuses for getting no useful results from my econometric exercises, often blaming the data instead of acknowledging our own incompetence. Oh I told them it was a futile exercise to begin with. But nobody ever listens. Lyrical verses flowing through my veins and they ask me to use crude words like heteroscedasticity.

Just when I was wishing most fervently that the universe itself would end, they started calling perfectly normal sectors of different galaxies – Beta 1 and Beta 2 – “regression coefficients”. It was too much for me to take. Had they taught me something useful, like how to combust spontaneously, I could have adequately expressed my thoughts. Words often don’t make the point: something that makes me feel very depressed. 

Choice for Spoilt

Economists often claim that, from a welfare perspective, more choice can never make one worse off. The argument is that if I’m given more options to choose from, I can’t possibly do worse because I still have all the options that were available to me in a smaller choice set. It’s a compelling argument. But what if the choice set is too large? Being lazy sounds pretty rational to me.

My inspiration for this argument, of course, is my job hunt. I started by staring blankly at the Google homepage wondering what I should type. I don’t even know which industry I want to work in so there really is no logical starting point to browse through all the choices unless I choose something entirely arbitrary. I like to think of myself as a new breed of ‘reasonably rational people’ or ‘neo-rational’. And I was somewhat relieved when I found that there are only about 5 firms that might bother to look at my CV. To think of all the time I would’ve spent writing preposterous cover letters had this realization not dawned upon me. The mental and psychological costs of browsing through choices are immense, particularly when you are required to repeatedly weigh the options of hating your job against not having one. The opportunity cost in terms of time is the loss of some serious youtubing.

Being neo-rational, I’m a strong believer in making decisions based on empirical evidence. I often toss an unbiased coin. Needless to say the coin can’t come to my rescue this time. Too much of anything in a non-theoretical world is bad. Listen to the old wise men who bothered to write proverbs that you could use when you don’t know how to end a blog post.