Reset and Reflections

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away...I started this blog. It's been 13 years to the day that my first post went live. I never dreamed when I started that it would take me on such a strange wonderful journey, down paths I never dreamed of going down. Blogging has brought me professional success and recognition, and put me in touch with many talented and intelligent people that have enriched my thinking and my life. It's been at turns illuminating, exhilarating, exasperating and frightening. All this from just a desire to openly express my thoughts on that driest of subjects, economics.

Three years ago, I took a decision to step back. I'd reached a point where I thought I'd said all I wanted to say. I'd also just lost my father, I was working in a new role with significantly larger responsibilities, and I also started taking better care of myself, working out to keep fit. All this took a toll on my time and energy. It felt like it was time to let younger and fresher voices to take on the challenges of the present. I thought my time had passed.

But that itch to write has never left. Blogging was a daily part of my routine for over ten years, and lately that itch has started growing again. So time and responsibilities permitting, I'm going to start writing again.

The past two years of dealing with a pandemic has accelerated a growing trend towards reexamining and reassessing many of the cherished foundations of economics, both macro and micro. There has never been a more exciting time to be an economist in recent memory. What started off as a questioning of the orthodoxy during the GFC has morphed with Covid into a battle of ideas we have not seen since the heyday of Keynes and Hayek. I want to put in my 2 cents worth.

So, hello world. Again.

5 Years On

I wasn’t paying attention last month and completely forgotten about it, but this blog hit its 5th anniversary on the 3rd of February, 2014.

Seems like I just started out yesterday, but its been a heck of a journey – personally, professionally and intellectually. Reading some of my old posts now, I can see many of my mistakes, but I also see just how much I’ve grown and matured through this process. It’s been an immensely rewarding and enriching experience.

Moreso since, based on my stat counters, the blog also hit 1 million page views some time in January, and over 600,000 visitors. Those are numbers beyond believable, which I never even looked for 5 years ago when this site was started as no more than a personal project to stay connected with my ex-colleagues.

Somehow it grew, and through it I’ve connected with a larger world, a larger Malaysia, than I’d ever thought to see. It’s brought me both friends and enemies, agreements and arguments, and I cherish all alike.

So from the bottom of my heart, to all my readers and commentators, and to my wife who has always encouraged my sometimes crazy mania for blogging, thank you. This site would be nothing without you…and neither would I.

Why Am I Blogging?

[This is a long post, so feel free to jump to the end. You’ll miss a lot of fun stuff if you do though]

A few weeks ago, Kartik Athreya of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond delivered a harsh attack on the economics blogosphere:

Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise

The following is a letter to open-minded consumers of the economics blogosphere. In the wake of the recent financial crisis, bloggers seem unable to resist commentating routinely about economic events. It may always have been thus, but in recent times, the manifold dimensions of the financial crisis and associated recession have given fillip to something bigger than a cottage industry. Examples include Matt Yglesias, John Stossel, Robert Samuelson, and Robert Reich. In what follows I will argue that it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors have anything interesting to say about economic policy. This sounds mean-spirited, but it’s not meant to be, and I’ll explain why.

Hello World!

The idea behind starting this blog was really two-fold. The first was to have a way to put down and present my ideas, work in progress, and thoughts on the Malaysian economy. The structure of a blog would enforce a more disciplined approach to my explorations of economics, as in, I wouldn't put out anything that didn't come across as reasoned, coherent and backed by data. The second reason was to hopefully attract critiques and feedback, that would help me improve on my own understanding of the way the world works, or at least, this little corner of it.

One way I'm hoping to make this more than just another economics blog, is to really focus on econometrics rather than just commentary. I'm continually discovering divergences between what happens in the 'real' world and the predictions of neoclassical theory (which is what most economics majors learn). This journey really began with my graduate studies, with an exposure to different schools of economic thought. I'm eternally grateful for that, as it really opened my eyes to a different way of viewing things, as well as explaining why, despite the elegant models I learned in school, not everyone agrees on the benefits of trade openess or free markets, for example.

Soo...Hello, World.