Thursday, June 11, 2009
The joy of economics
Two interesting readings. First, on the life of the economic policy team in the US today. From an Indian point of view, it makes you think about the lack of comparable intellectual firepower. And another, on using economics in the realworld. Generally, when we think of direct engineering applications of economics, we think of finance, but this is in a new setting: google.
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1. Are you sure that it is the just the lack of intellectual firepower and not deference to heirarchy, power plays and egos that preclude the possibility of such debate in India? And then there are the hurdles of 'personalising the issue' and 'arguing not debating' that need to be crossed too.
ReplyDelete2. Great link to googlenomics! Makes me want to go back to the world of Finance and Economics again. Thank you for that.
India is a land of funny-mental momentum players/traders, semi-literate corporate managers, clueless fund managers, pompous investors and closed brain politicians.
ReplyDeleteWith current financial crisis, They have got further excuse to remain financial economy as much closed as possible. They don't understand the financial engineering jargon. Forget to implement it.
There are no possibilities to apply one's intellect or earn from it in this country.
gaurav.
Ouch, Gaurav sounds quite despondent.
ReplyDeleteJust wanted to add my 2p, really do hope it helps:
"There are no possibilities to apply one's intellect or earn from it in this country."
... until the Indian economy achieves basic goals which contribute to raising the human capital standard to a point where your intellect (or lets say expertise instead) is in demand and useful to the economy.
Or in other words, we are behind developed economies (power, infra, tech, finance, etc) and until we solve the basic problems we can't graduate to solving problems that are relevant for developed economies - this is very generally speaking.
Particularly in your case, the Indian financial system is still way behind other systems as you have said.
However, having said that, I would not agree with you that there are no possibilities to apply fin engg to earn in this country. For e.g; why don't you try algo trading? Algo trading should be a lucrative opportunity in a young market like India's (with momo players, pompous investors, etc, etc to quote you... making it somewhat easier for quants). Some of the global players are looking at algo trading in India as well so you will also have the satisfaction of competing against the best in the global quant business.
Secondly, if the fin engg is really useful it still needs to be sold - so that the business sees value. Selling fin eng has always been tough and slow historically even in the developed countries - there have always been cultural hurdles because of how business was done in the past. As for any idea, it needs work until it reaches the tipping point (Malcolm Gladwell's phrase).
Cheers!