A Quote by James Tobin
I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.
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Regardless of past aspirations, this is the right time to be focusing on services for two specific reasons The increasing ubiquity of broadband has made it viable, and the proven economics of the advertising model has made it profitable.
Economics is a good degree to have but the subject is very theoretical at Cambridge and I found it frustrating that you can't apply a lot of the models to particular circumstances.
This is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked. “Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.
Anyway that's a large part of what economics is - people arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven't just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful
I'm not sure whether it counts as a talent, but I love playing 'Magic: The Gathering.' It's mathematical and intellectually challenging, and makes me feel nostalgic for when I played as a kid.
One thing I've learned in my limited experience is you can justify anything intellectually. There are a million reasons to stay with someone, and a million reasons to end something - so you can really only trust your gut.
There are two kinds of talent, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while.
Outsiders always look for a reason to explain why they are not inside. They never look in the mirror. Let's face it, the profession I'm in is a very simple and a very cruel one. There is no way that you can create a career for someone without talent and no way to stop a career of someone with talent.
However, the fact that an economist offers a theoretical analysis does not and should not automatically command respect. What is needed is some assurance that the analysis is actually relevant.
I'm talking about intellectually and emotionally challenging, but at the same time it's actually not that challenging. So there's this dichotomy.
I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.
I entered economics because of a course I took on 'information economics,' which I found fascinating.
Economics profession, they've been - they've been confident in various formulas, but economics is not physics. The same formula that works in one decade doesn't work in the next. Economics is a difficult subject.
I do sense, as compared with let's say the early '50s, there's somewhat more of a careerism. I don't think it's anything special to economics; it's equally true with physics or biology. A graduate education has become a more career-oriented thing, and part of that is because of the need for funding. In fact, that's a much worse problem in the natural sciences than it is in economics. So you can't even do your work in the natural sciences, particularly, and even to some extent in economics, without funding.
How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.
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