Learning from an Economist: theory vs practice

Learning from an Economist: theory vs practice:

It was great to speak to yet another economist this summer. Our conversation was very useful and I was able to learn what it takes to be a good economist in the real world. I used text to speech for this, so sorry if some SPAG is wrong.

We first discussed academia and theory versus what happens in real life. The economist suggested that I try and criticize theory and read the works of Richard thaler and David Kahneman. These are behavioral economists which will give you insight to the real world. He mentioned to understand what's going on the economy through podcast reading what high quality bloggers are writing. Examples included Bloomberg's oblates podcast and the macro podcast at HSBC. Here it is important to notice that you should learn economics at a level and university but not treat everything as gospel.

Having understood his role as an interviewer through his LinkedIn profile I asked him what skills would be best to portray across in an interview. He suggested critical thinking was an important skill I would ask questions like what would you do if you were at the Bank of England right now. In addition you have to be comfortable with data and you would ask something along the lines of what's your favorite excel function. Other qualities that they look for is how to present am I able to cope with charts what I could look to improve in a chart and challenge what's in front of me. It's a common theme with most economists but this economist also suggested how it's really important to try and work in the Bank of England/Treasur when starting as a graduate.

We moved on to theoretical questions and I asked him about what could be done by the government instead of QB to get out of the global financial crisis. A really nice point that he mentioned was about stock prices and the stock prices did not just go up because of asset bearing wealth but because of merit and due to the magnificent 7 actually performing itself.

This brought us onto the current economy where we talked about what's going on the headwinds and tailwinds that we are facing right now. We discussed how the labour government's policies are quite quite good the issue principle and the benefit of investment investment however are lacking the backing of public to really push these policies forward. Here we also talked about the recent voting age and how potentially a cap might be wanting to be introduced so that we get a more long-term focused government instead of merely focusing on the older generation that the UK sees.