Why I like economics
October 19th, 2009 by ftobiaI’m an intuitive person: I’m more concerned with broad-reaching theories than with any particular instantiation of fact. I scored a solid N on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. That’s not to say I don’t like facts. On the contrary, theories need to be generalized from somewhere, and starting with the known state of the world is common sense. But I don’t operate in Sensing-land — I need to be able to clearly see the general pattern in order to understand something.
Framed this way, I like economics for the same reason I like engineering. The extensive maths used in both fields are a means of grounding one’s intuition in something substantial, something provable. Maths allow one to derive, from a set of axioms and real-world data, a bunch of consistent theorems, equations, etc. that describe the system the axioms (and data) generate. If your intuition clashes with your results, either you’re wrong or you made a math mistake. Here you have a very solid check to balance out your intuition.
This allows me to satisfy two competing objectives: first, I don’t want to spend all my time in math land; second, I don’t want my intuitions to be wildly off base. So I ponder my intuition, I learn the requisite maths, and then I can go write a bunch of equations to ensure that my intuition is correct.
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