Sharing is Caring

I believe a commentary on the public transport system in my new hometown is overdue. I miss the metro. Even the weird uncles who would repeat, "Metro sahi hai" to anyone who looked in their general direction. The buses here are no better than the buses anywhere else in India. But I must admit that the bus conductors here do have a better sense of irony than those in Delhi, who yell, "Andar ho jaao" to passengers who can't even find any space for their hands - in their desperation they put them in other people's pockets. Local trains are just larger versions of buses without the convenience of dropping you close enough to your destination, thereby ensuring that you to turn up for work looking far from presentable. 

Autowallahs here are so awful that I feel like I should start praying for the good health and longevity of the autowallahs in Delhi. On the bright side, autowallahs here don't discriminate. It doesn't matter if you're a local or an outsider; if you take an auto, you will be fleeced. It often costs more to take an auto than a cab. In exchange for the cost advantage, cabs are delightfully unreliable and cab companies are yet to figure out call wait. 

That leaves share autos. Travelling in a share auto is a lot like life. You keep waiting for an auto that will "be right" for you: not too crowded and headed towards the place you want to reach. But when you start feeling like time isn't on your side anymore, you take what you get. You struggle to get your foot in the door. You fight for your space. You let people step on your toes and put up with much discomfort because you have to reach your destination somehow. And as soon as you get comfortable, it's time to get off.

The level of ingenuity and dexterity displayed by most of the people on the road makes driving the sole preserve of those with infinite patience and wisdom. There are two activities that can seriously compromise your psychological health: dealing with bureaucracy and driving. I foolishly undertook both roughly around the same time. As a result, I have become  ridiculously foul-mouthed, at times surpassing my own knowledge of my proficiency in the area. 

Experience has taught me that in order to feel that warm afterglow after you swear, that feeling of being in perfect harmony with the universe, you have to swear in Hindi. Our national language is brilliant, for no other language could permit you to be so concise and still curse in such detail. 

Even Cheaper Talk

I’m quite intrigued by cheap talk, probably because it constitutes about 90 per cent of my conversations. Cheap talk models would probably be better understood if course instructors use more frequently occurring examples from the students’ lives. Consider the example of asking an instructor what the syllabus for an exam is. He has (or will) set the paper himself and he knows whether or not a student should read a certain paper with a probability of 100 percent. However, there are conflicting interests at work. The instructor wants the student to read and learn as much as possible and uses the exam as an incentive mechanism to achieve his end. He may also want to ask a student to read all the papers in a reading list because he wants to keep his options open (in the event that he is yet to draft the question paper). So when a student asks an instructor whether a paper that was not covered in class but was referred to in some lecture or is available in the reading list is important for the exam, the standard answer is, “You can read through it”: the babbling equilibrium. Just as the theory predicts, this isn’t reason enough for many students to understand that there’s no point in playing the game at all.

Economics students would probably be a lot smarter if they weren't so rational. 

Never Again

I don’t like equations and equations don’t like me. We maintain a comfortable distance at all times to avoid any awkward social situations. We had a pretty long relationship but things ended badly and it’s a bit difficult to claim to study economics and be at war with equations at the same time. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Many of my exams require me to memorise equations. This is something that I neither enjoy nor excel at. So I put it off. I procrastinate until the night before the exam. At night, I tell myself that I must get adequate sleep before the exam and that it’s a good idea to go over the equations in the morning, arguing with myself that my memory has a recency bias. I wake up freakishly early in the morning and procrastinate some more. In the metro, I casually glance through the equations and tell myself that I’m smart enough to work it out, still putting off the actual memorising. As last minute panic grips me before I enter the exam hall, I frantically leaf through my notes, but I tell myself that it’s impossible for me to know what I don’t already know in the next 5 minutes. So I put it off for “some other time.”

During the exam, predictably, I don’t remember the equations. For the ones I think I remember, I can’t correctly derive the results, possibly because I can’t remember all the parameters correctly. As gloom descends upon me I curse the evaluation methodology, the examination pattern, the education system and the universe in general.

After the exam, I tell myself that I’ll do better next time. The bad news is that I lied to myself each time. The good news is I’ve run out of exams. Somehow I don’t feel quite as happy as I thought I would about that. It’s as if there is no point in wasting time anymore.

Size Matters

A lot of economics is about predicting people’s behaviour using axioms akin to laws in physics. The assumption that economics is like the physical sciences really bothers me. I side with Friedrich Hayek: the system is too complex for us to be able to provide a precise model of economic behaviour.

That scientific tools should not be directly applied in economics has been said many times before, but it’s not a point that usually receives the attention that it should, probably because most (but not all) of the people who say so are those who suck at maths. It’s hard to say why people persist with the use of complex calculus in behavioural modelling even though it is impossible for a majority of the population to even understand the reasoning process being ascribed to them, and the minority that does understand it would have to be in need of therapy if they really stood around at supermarkets trying to figure out how many units they should buy to equate the marginal utility to their marginal utility from money.

Russ Roberts argues that economics is more like biology than physics, and draws an interesting analogy between the two:

“We do not expect a biologist to forecast how many squirrels will be alive in ten years if we increase the number of trees in the United States by 20%. A biologist would laugh at you. But that is what people ask of economists all the time.”

Economists are rather cocky and don’t acknowledge the limitations of the field. We can look for the causes, try to understand the relationships between variables, figure out what incentives work, which ones don’t and in what settings or the channels through which a policy or action can take effect – but to believe we can predict the exact outcome and mathematically calculate the magnitude of the change in different variables is, well, cute – we can’t, and we’ve been wrong nearly every time we tried.

But perhaps there is something we can learn from physics. In his talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, Richard Feynman says,

“Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics... we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things.”

Early models of the atom had subatomic particles arranged like the solar system: a nucleus at the centre with electrons orbiting it. There was no reason to assume such perfect symmetry between the two. It later turned out that the atom looked quite different.

In economics, we assume identical, rational micro agents and predict macro results by aggregating their behaviour. Microeconomics is more intuitive, in a sense more reliable because it is reasonable to assume that individuals try to maximise over certain parameters. But expecting perfect conformity between micro and macro outcomes may not be quite so reasonable. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that on the macro level, the presence of some non-rational agents or collective decision-making leads to thoroughly counterintuitive results.

The results might be quite different if we focus on studying macro behaviour as a whole instead of specifying individual motives for each micro agent beforehand. All we can really say is that when a lot of people’s behaviour is aggregated, on average it tends to produce certain types of results. 

Talk is Trash

I recently studied a few cheap talk models, beginning with the seminal paper by Crawford and Sobel in 1982. By “cheap talk”, most economists really mean free talk. A cheap talk game is one where one agent can send a message without incurring any exogenous cost: the only cost incurred is endogenous, i.e. it affects the sender’s payoff by influencing the receiver’s action choice. In short, cheap talk is a costless signal.

From a linguistic perspective, the “talk is cheap” maxim is traditionally taken to mean that the words in a message could be meaningless and need not be supported by truth, actions or evidence. The rising popularity of sarcasm should lend some added meaning to the phrase: what is said is very different from what is meant because the inherent meaning of our words is often diluted by how we say it.

So is the game theoretic use of the phrase cheap talk itself cheap talk? No! Economists are nothing if not precise. But it is possible that calling an entire subset of signalling games “Cheap Talk” is an attempt to make it sound a lot more interesting than it really is. If cheap talk is enough to make a paper sound interesting, imagine how much more intriguing a trash talk model would seem. Measuring the cost of indulging in trash talk and weighing it against the psychological advantage it confers could help us calculate whether being courteous is worthwhile at all. Children waste much of their childhood learning social conventions and much of their adult life brimming with resentment as they teach their children to fight their instinct to be frank.

Such a model might do to social relations what the prisoner’s dilemma did to gang loyalty – although it is socially optimal for all of us to be nice and the outcome is Pareto superior to any other, if each of us acts in a self-interested manner, being nasty would be a dominant strategy unless social ostracism outweighs the personal gain from feeling smug. However, if the psychological cost of courtesy is greater than its social benefit, we could adjust social structures to eliminate the rationale for teenage rebellion and angst altogether. It would be fascinating to see teenagers rebel by being excessively nice to everyone because their parents were so blunt all the time. Gandhi would be so proud. 

Losing my Decisions

Choice has made me miserable. You might even say that the constant stress of decision-making has ruined my life. It’s the more trivial choices that drive me insane. This is how having to make a choice really makes me feel. I didn’t worry so much about my choices earlier and I’m forced to admit that the pursuit of economics has a not-entirely-unimportant role to play in this matter.

It would save me much mental turmoil if I could just appoint someone else to make decisions for me. But the rebel in me would start resenting the decision-maker and wondering if I should follow his advice and that will be yet another choice I have to make. I’m beginning to have serious misgivings about the economic assertion that more choice makes a person better off.

Enter coin. My pride won’t allow me to outsource decision-making to anybody else, so I use the humble coin. It’s a dear. It has no ideological leanings that could cause me to see its recommendations through a tinted glass. It always has the time for me. It never judges me. And so far, it has never been wrong. I must mention here, before you dismiss my decision-making mechanism, that I’m not alone in randomising decisions and hoping that on an average, no other decision-making algorithm can consistently outperform a coin toss.

Much as I hate to make choices, the truth is that I have already chosen. The answer is in my head but I don’t know it because it’s hidden under many layers of rationalisations and tautological arguments. The coin forces the truth out of me: I keep increasing the sample size until the coin tells me what I want to hear. Or so I tell myself lest the rebel in me should start resenting the coin too. 

13

If there’s one thing we all absolutely adore, it’s superstition; even if it isn’t our own creation. If a lot of people seem to believe it, then it must be true. The lack of logic just gives it some mystique. Everyone could use some mystique, right?

It is courtesy our charming ways and beliefs that many buildings don’t have a 13^th floor. They call it the 14^th floor instead. As if poor counting will negate bad luck. Apparently two wrongs do make a right. The number 13 being unlucky is an old Christian belief but it seems to have found resonance across cultures. My research informs me that there’s actually a word for it: triskaidekaphobia. 

It’s quite interesting to me that an arbitrary set of beliefs can affect outcomes. People believe 13 is unlucky and so very few of them are willing to buy a house or an office on the 13^th floor. This  causes prices and/or the probability of sale to fall, thereby ensuring that the number becomes unlucky for real estate developers merely because enough buyers believe it to be. So people choose to drop poor 13 from the number system altogether. Self-fulfilling prophecies don’t get any stranger than this.

I must consult a numerologist about the importance of lowest common multiples and highest common factors in arriving at decisions about how lucky a number is. Are multiples of 13 also unlucky? Would people be all right with living on the 26^th floor or is that twice as unlucky as 13? The problem with detecting self-fulfilling prophecies that are irrational is that you don’t gain any predictive power from such knowledge. 

In Defence of my Frenemy

I read a wonderful article about maths recently. It drew my attention to the treatment of maths in economics. Social scientists hold what can only be described as militant views on the use of mathematics. Those who are good at it insist that it is the only plausible reasoning mechanism. Those who aren’t argue that it’s hogwash. Oh what well-reasoned arguments.

The need for mathematics is well-established in the physical sciences. But it is, after all, just a tool. Considering a paper good just because it is sufficiently mathematical is akin to rewarding the methods employed rather than the result achieved. It could be argued that the result is more rigorous when proven mathematically, but that’s not always a valid argument when one is trying to describe human behaviour. Given that there are more than enough people who hate maths, it is probably reasonable to assume that nobody will employ a very complex reasoning process merely because some researcher believes that it is the only one sufficiently sophisticated to be attributed to a rational individual.

Asserting that the use of mathematics to derive economic results is rubbish just because it is beyond one’s comprehension is pretentious. It takes an ostrich’s brain to insist that something is not true merely because one lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it. The use of maths brings some regularity and predictability to behaviour, a necessary simplification for modelling anything. 

There might, however, be a case for substituting bedtime stories for children with bedtime mathematical equations. They’ll fall asleep quicker, there is a lower chance of them imbibing any prejudices on account of the parents’ carelessness in choosing a story and who knows, they might turn out smarter. 

What Economics Wants

So far, I learnt that everything we do is well-reasoned, properly justified and can be modelled using basic calculus and linear algebra. So well-reasoned across all individuals in fact, that it can be correctly and precisely aggregated. We optimise our choices all the time. We can perfectly predict the future. (How come astrologers are frauds when they make that claim but economists are geniuses?) Once we commit to an action, we make sure that we follow it through. All this just contributes towards making us the wonderfully regular, rational, trade-off talking people we are.

But that’s not all. In economics and other social sciences, we have built models for how we choose where to live in terms of access to education, the composition of the neighbourhood and a lot of other factors that I can no longer remember. Based on our identity, cost of education and employer beliefs conditional on social identity, we emit some signal. Based on this signal, we could be assigned some job that we supposedly want with some probability. Considering the amount of mathematics required for these important but relatively straightforward decisions we make, I’m frankly amazed that we manage to breathe without analysing ourselves to death.

I think students of economics should be charged the lowest possible insurance premium. Have you ever seen a reckless economist? We’re dull, boring, predictable and worst of all, rational. Insurance firms couldn’t ask for more. I bet they can’t find another category of people less likely to get into scrapes.

Popular Media Invokes Economics Correctly

Nice story, this. Rawls and Nozick were really political philosophers whose ideas were later applied in economics. Economists like to revere those who don't call themselves economists. Nevertheless, it's nice to know something I studied is applicable in a relevant debate. This is sort of what I had in mind when I started this blog but I suppose I'd be a lot less entertaining if I really wrote such articles. 

The Kiss of Death

It was an ominous day when I was appointed to the placement cell of my undergraduate college. Within weeks it became patently clear that there would be a financial crisis. Indeed, the following summer saw a global food crisis, uncontrollable oil prices, spiralling inflation and an economic recession looming in the horizon. When the placement season began, I was asked to call all investment banks. The first bank I called was Lehman Brothers. After that, every company I called shut down within weeks. I decided I had done enough damage and quietly bowed out.

During my Master’s, I was careful not to be affiliated in any way with the placement cell. However, when the placement season started, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to apply to a couple of companies. So that’s what I did. I applied to exactly two companies. Both of them decided not to recruit anybody at all from our campus. I’ve decided not to apply to any more firms because it wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the students.

I’m wondering if I can blackmail firms with this unique skill I have. But what good would it do? If my calls can cause firms to shut down and my resume can cause a hiring freeze at every organisation it enters, what would hiring me do to the company?

How Drumming Will Improve Your Economics

I’m convinced that drummers would make marvellous economists. I don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t. They are used to dealing with a lot of variables at the same time. Anyone who can handle tom-toms, a floor tom, a bass drum, a snare drum and a variety of cymbals should laugh in the face of hypothetical constructs like treatment effects. A good drummer is as precise as a good economist, if not more. They also appear to find joy in pursuing something that was considered an accompaniment, and have gradually taken centre stage, becoming an indispensable part of the paradigm that created them. Additionally, drummers have a certain charisma that economists could really use.

Given my track record in economics, what would happen if I tried my hand at drumming? Well it’s a relatively easy forecast for a seasoned pseudo-economist like me to make. At first, I would appear almost prodigious, “a natural” at what most people find difficult. Then suddenly it would dawn upon everyone that I lack some skill that is essential for drumming, say timing. Then I’ll reject the principles of drumming and call them counterintuitive. And finally I’ll wind up as a technically flawed “intuitive” pseudo-drummer. I think I’d be all right with that. Just as the most appealing part of an economist to me is eloquence, the thing I value most in a drummer is panache. I read my fairytales carefully and I know appearances wouldn’t appear if they didn’t matter. 

Holy Matrimony

I must be a pretty big fan of matrimony because I keep trying to marry things – like finance and development or business and research. In writing a blog, I tried to marry my expertise in fake news with my desire to make a last ditch attempt at salvaging my interest in economics. The first couple of months passed in absolute wedded bliss. Then fake news started paying more attention to politics. When real news started getting funnier than fake news, the latter had a midlife crisis. Economics, meanwhile, pregnant with the aftermath of the financial crisis started having severe mood swings. The marriage is in shambles now. The financial crisis is a 21^st century bastard. I’ve decided to stop playing matchmaker for a bit.

Say No to Mutual Disdain

It appears to me that there is some mutual disdain between MBAs and economists. So I decided to resolve the problem in a manner befitting a neo-rationalist.

Economics would define a rational individual as one whose returns to investing in education are higher than the costs.  Let’s say there are 3 types of returns to education: monetary returns, which are frequently advertised by placement cells; social returns: let’s say this is the disutility from having people who don’t really know you asking you “But why _________ (insert-name-of-course)?” – we seek to minimise this; and private returns – your ability to satisfy your own prejudices about education and knowledge by studying the course that you choose. The costs of education are monetary costs, the psychological costs of having every weekend ruined by a Monday test for two years, physical costs in the form of sleep deprivation and the opportunity cost of sitting home and doing nothing.

Monetary costs and physical costs are usually higher for MBAs. Let’s assume that the psychological costs and opportunity cost are the same for both. MBAs clearly have higher monetary and social returns to education. Private returns that exceed the sum of monetary and social returns signify a greater-than-average-sized ego and I’m sure that can be accommodated satisfactorily in the realms of rationality. It appears to me that economists use the positive NPV method while MBAs try to maximise the difference between expected wages and signalling costs. We act smug and they act smart.

It should be possible to create software that calculates return on education based on student profile, placement statistics of the institute and cost of the course with a corresponding probability distribution for jobs that the student is likely to land. It would be a runaway hit in India. Matrimonial sites will have a field day trying to steal the code. 

The Worst Consumer

I find it quite tiresome to take myself shopping. It would be completely out of line to say that this is because I’m not properly schooled in the joys of exchanging money for something that I believe has greater marginal utility because, as my parents will testify a million times over, of course I am. No, that’s not the problem at all. I’m just a very difficult person to shop with. If I turn up somewhere aimlessly with no intention of buying anything, I end up making several regrettably useless impulse purchases. When I do plan my shopping expeditions, I have such a specific idea in mind that it’s nearly impossible to find what I want. Being a strong believer in the “power of the consumer”, I drag the hapless idiot who agreed to shop with me from store to store, making faces at everything available. Shopping can also instil a very strong belief in love at first sight. 

Consider shopping for formals. This is my least favourite type of shopping because I’m required to spend a lot of money buying clothes I wish I didn’t have to wear. I try my best to find the perfect fit and then wear it as sloppily as possible to register my protest against the practice of coercing adults to wear uncomfortable clothes that rarely look good. I believe formal clothing is a devious corporate agenda that seeks to restrict movement to make employees seem measured and graceful and emphasise every flaw in their body so that they are too self-conscious to be particularly rebellious at work.

All this vileness notwithstanding, I had another “love at first sight” incident when I went shopping for a formal jacket. I fell hopelessly in love with a grey jacket. My sister, staunch believer that she is in the “black is always in” philosophy, insisted that I look for a black jacket because grey would make me “look old” and “unlike someone looking for a job”. Her opposition reinforced my faith in the grey jacket and I argued that I wanted to look wise beyond my years and unlike a typical job-seeker.

We finally ended up looking for a black jacket (just to compare) and when I found it, that was sort of love too. Helped along its way by its reasonable price tag, I settled for it. But it wasn’t my first love. I soon started having misgivings about it and started telling myself that I looked like a funeral director in it.

It’s an absolute joy to be enrolled in an economics course when every rationality assumption  crumbles before you. 

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.

The Perils of Optimisation and the Gift of Time

One of the most important skills required for someone who has to spend a lot of time travelling everyday is the ability to convince oneself that it really is “the gift of time”. It turns out, however, that when you have so many ways to kill time, such a gift really can’t be taken lightly. So I set about my optimisation exercise like I often do (somewhat unnecessarily). Of course I was only concerned with making optimal use of the time I spent travelling because that was the only “additional gift” I perceived – the rest of it was wasted exactly as before.

I took this optimisation exercise rather seriously so I constantly tried to read faster on the metro so that I wouldn’t have to carry the book around for too long (I’m not sure what my reasoning was for this because I always replaced it with an equally heavy book). While changing trains I’d hurriedly create playlists while running up the stairs, often running into people or nearly falling down. I was something of a nuisance to other passengers. All this running around was, of course, to pretend that I was following some sort of exercise regimen. I also wanted to minimise travel time because I did recognise that everything I did on the metro was just very organised time wasting.

I started planning fastidiously for the next day’s commute, often spending more time planning than I did travelling. My plans were overambitious. I almost always fell short of my goals and I would get off the metro thoroughly exhausted, relieved to have reached home/college so that I could waste time out of my pre-existing quota in a more regular fashion.

I try not to optimise too much these days. There's a time and place for everything.

  

Optimising the Contents of your Bag

When I first read an article by Jeremy Clarkson where he complained about how women carry far too many things in their handbags, I chuckled, feeling strangely superior to all those lost women out there. I carry a big backpack – it makes me look 21 instead of almost 22 – but the bag was always nearly empty at the time.

Then I moved to the other end of the city and my bag became heavy. A big backpack became practical instead of being an accessory. If that’s not a sign of ageing, I don’t know what is. I started carrying things that I never had at all earlier – hand sanitizer, wet tissues, books to read on the metro, extra pens, notes, band aid, cough lozenges and God alone knows what else. I’m even a bit afraid of emptying out my bag these days because I don’t know what will turn up. And it’s not that the change occurred overnight. They are adaptations to problems – I had to face the prospect of eating with dirty hands, inexplicable injuries when I’m 30 minutes away from anything that’s even mildly familiar, a cold, boredom, guilt for not studying, and so on. After a month of shuttling between New Delhi and not-so-new Delhi in order to “pursue Economics at the Master's level”, I felt it’s about time Economics gave me something in return. I decided to apply what I had learnt to optimise the contents of my bag. I wanted to regain the respect that I once imagined Mr. Clarkson would have for me.

The first thing I discovered was that it helps to carry “big stuff”. This might seem counterintuitive, but the idea is to keep your bag clean and everything easy to find. If everything in your bag is large and heavy, you’re unlikely to carry anything you don’t need. It’s because the weight or space taken up by something is negligible that you throw it in and never take it out. For instance you would always remember to remove a big, heavy book once you finish reading it rather than a newspaper, 2-page notes, comics and suchlike. It also prevents you from buying crap that you’ll never take out. If you carry a small bottle you’ll invariably have many half-empty bottles of water you bought somewhere left in your bag.

The second rule is a monthly stock-taking. Ideally it should be weekly but it might not give you the same satisfaction because there won’t be as much rubbish and Mr. Clarkson will think you’re fastidious. Throw out everything you didn’t use that month. If everything you carry is pretty large, you might end up cleaning your room this way.

The third rule is not to carry substitutes. For instance you don’t need an iPod if it’s possible to load songs on to your phone, which will always be the case because it’s unlikely that you’re willing to spend on an iPod but not on a halfway decent phone. The iPod does give you an image advantage but that will be negated by the amount of crap you sift through in your bag to find it.

The fourth rule is never to buy anything unless you’re thoroughly psyched about it. That’s the only way you will remember to take it out of your bag when you get home. It will also prevent you from throwing in receipts that could line the bottom of your bag for many years.

The last rule is not to plan for contingencies. A lot of the material that I write is generated when I wind up in unfortunate circumstances. If I make it a point to carry everything I could possibly need when I fall, tear my lenses, get drenched in the rain, spill food on my clothes, find myself in a medical emergency or face the dilemma of ingesting food that could potentially cause jaundice, I wouldn’t have anything to write about.

Economics is a Diva, research shows

Researchers who are paid to do research of this sort have found that Economics is a diva. “We conducted a structured study over many decades to obtain this result and it has been worth the effort,” says Thomas Smith of the University of Wedonthaveanythingbettertodo, who headed the study.

“We began by determining Economics’ gender, and that was quite simple because privileged white men have been obsessing over her for centuries,” said one of Dr. Smith’s enthusiastic interns.

“After years of thinking and figuring things out we decided that she is a diva because of certain behavioural traits that emerged,” another equally enthusiastic intern chimed in until Dr. Smith cut him off. “You see, she adopts the wayward children of Mathematics, Physics, Psychology and Sociology and gives them ridiculous names but has no children of her own. In addition to that, she has had affairs with nearly everyone from public policy to complex mathematics but she is still single.”

Not to be outdone, the visibly hurt intern whom Dr. Smith had cut off added, “Her marriage with political thought ended disastrously but the alimony made her rich enough to the live the rest of her life off it. She also spends a lot of time managing her public image and has a lot of money that she doesn’t exactly deserve.”

“A lot of people consider her insanely hot and go for her even though they know that she doesn’t have too much intrinsic value,” Dr. Smith concluded.