How I came to be interested in economics
For too long I lived my life believing that economics was boring. The small pieces of economy news I got from TV and papers was rich in numbers and descriptions of specific events but thin on information about the larger picture. That changed when one day July, coincidentally the first day that the iPhone was on sale here in Sweden. I was in line outside a store for a few hours in the morning and while I was waiting I was listening to podcasts of the radio show This American Life. One specific episode caught my attention, and that was a one hour program dedicated to trying to explain the subprime mortgage crisis called The Giant Pool of Money. I found the story incredibly fascinating and when I had listened to the end I wanted more. So I looked around, primarily for podcasts with economy news, explanations and commentary and I found lots of interesting stuff. I followed NPR Economy News and learned a bit here and there, and then, when the real crisis hit in mid September I was hooked.
I found the Planet Money podcast from NPR that has been producing almost daily episodes. The length suits the bike ride down to the office almost perfectly. In addition to that I’ve been listening to Bloomberg on the economy which has had some really interesting stuff. Both programs mainly interviews different kinds of experts and ask them questions about current events in the financial and political system. That, combined with some blogposts and online newspaper articles has opened my eyes to a whole new world of knowledge. The world economy is such a complex machinery, with interactions that no one can fully understand but at the same time something that affects us all in many ways every day.
One thing that struck me when thinking about this is how much more difficult it would be to acquire the same amount of knowledge 15 years ago. I can now learn complicated stuff about how intra-bank lending works or doesn’t work and hear expert opinions about the levels of interest rates for free, without the need to have a higher education in economics or subscribe to any publications.
I think that this new easy access to massive amounts of knowledge and explanations of complex systems is something of a radical change in the pace of the development of the human race. Thinks might look depressing right now, when many people are talking about a world recession, but in the long run I think that the fact that the barriers to access to knowledge has lowered so much in just the last years will make life on this planet much better in years to come. That thought makes me happy.
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