Brainstorm: Learning About Economics

Read the books

I hear a lot of interesting reasons why people go to college these days. A common one is, “I need the accountability and pressure to finish things or else I would never do them.” Hundreds of thousands of dollars for accountability? Good luck with that. Going to college can be great but not because of a lack of discipline.

Something I started doing a long time ago and continue to do today is simply go to major university websites, download the syllabuses and reading lists of major classes, and read through everything. I’ll then write out a synthesis of everything I learned and figure out how it relates to my current domain. Writing is a fundamental part of the learning process because it tests and refines your ability to form and implement thoughts.

I have even written papers and emailed them to professors asking for questions and feedback. Many times the professors reply with very helpful feedback. Seems like a pretty easy way to learn in my opinion.

At the moment, I am working through a number of the resources on the University of Glasgow’s economics program:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/subjects/economics/

Now some of you might think that the way I’m going about this isn’t as good as actually being in class or being enrolled. Could this be true? Yeah maybe. Instead of thinking about it in terms of good or bad, I think about it in terms of tradeoffs. Do I miss out on conversations with professors and students? Sure. However, students and professors aren’t actively around practitioners trying to solve tangible problems, I am. So instead of thinking about it being good or bad, I think about the advantage I might have learning this material without going through the traditional process.

The one thing I think is missed in many universities is that problems almost always have a temporal nature to them. People make billions of dollars because they find a specific problem during a specific period of time to solve. No one is going to pay you to solve the problems of the 1990s. This is why being around practitioners can be incredibly valuable as you are learning theory.

It’s actually interesting, I have always been a practitioner. The theory was never my starting point. But as I progress more and more, I realize the beauty and value of theoretical concepts since they explain a lot of the WHY behind the causal mechanics of a system that couldn’t be discerned from an empirical inductive approach.

Other than reading economic books from the University of Glasgow and trading, I am spending a lot of time refining my coding abilities and trying to figure out some machine-learning math. All exciting stuff when you realize the power it gives you.

In the information age, you simply need to be at the right place, at the right time, with the right information to succeed

Thanks for reading!