Tag: writing

On Note-Taking Apps

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Google Keep. Microsoft OneNote. Roam. Obsidian. Notion. Readwise.

There are other apps with whom I’ve had, so to speak, even shorter relationships, but the ones above are the ones that I have really and truly tried to use on an extensive basis. Google Keep, as with so many other things Google, is excellent in some ways, but utterly hopeless in others. You’ll never guess what their latest enhancement is, for example. OneNote was very promising, but Microsoft went through a bit of a phase where they had a OneNote app for Windows, and a separate one for Office365, and it just got too confusing for words. Roam was too expensive at 15USD per month, and Obsidian had too steep a learning curve for me. And if you want to talk about steep learning curves, you should try out Notion. Gah.

The latest one that I’m trying out is Readwise, and well, it’s going… ok, I guess. And we all know what that really means, don’t we?

Long story short, none of these have really worked out for me. And that, I suspect, is the case for most of you reading this. There will be some who are true converts and zealots of any one of these, and I envy you. I really do, good for you, really! But whichever one of these you’re selling, I’m not really on the market. And no, that other new new one ain’t for me either, whichever one it is.

And that’s why this article in The Verge really resonated with me:

Note-taking, after all, does not take place in a vacuum. It takes place on your computer, next to email, and Slack, and Discord, and iMessage, and the text-based social network of your choosing. In the era of alt-tabbing between these and other apps, our ability to build knowledge and draw connections is permanently challenged by what might be our ultimately futile efforts to multitask.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

As always, do go through the whole thing. It is full of fascinating snippets, including the somewhat surprising, somewhat entirely predictable finding that the average time we spend on a single screen before shifting our attention elsewhere was 2.5 minutes. If that seems too long for you, you’re right. That was in 2004. Today’s stats? 47 seconds.

The author of the article goes on to hope (as do some of us, while others are repulsed by the thought) that AI will help us make sense of all of these links that we have been squirrelling away for years. I’m on Team Maybe about this myself. But I really do agree with this bit:

In short: it is probably a mistake, in the end, to ask software to improve our thinking. Even if you can rescue your attention from the acid bath of the internet; even if you can gather the most interesting data and observations into the app of your choosing; even if you revisit that data from time to time — this will not be enough. It might not even be worth trying.
The reason, sadly, is that thinking takes place in your brain. And thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/25/23845590/note-taking-apps-ai-chat-distractions-notion-roam-mem-obsidian

And that is, in a way, comforting and reassuring. I haven’t failed all these awesome note-taking apps, and they haven’t failed me either. In each of these cases, it just wasn’t meant to be.

The article refers to the works of Andy Matuschak (Google him if you don’t know who he is), who says that the ultimate goal is to think effectively (amen!), and that all of us should really be thinking about two questions.

  1. What practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?
  2. How can I shepherd my attention effectively?

Don’t look to me for the answer to the second of these questions, I have no idea. If you know the answer, help a guy out, will ya? But I do have my own personal answer regarding the first of these questions.

I read a lot. Not as much as some others that I know, and I wish I read more, but I do think I read more than the average person. Some of what I read I find interesting enough to talk about with some people whose opinions I truly value. Some of these conversations end up being friendly arguments, where they challenge my view, and I challenge theirs. Then I have a cup of coffee and think about some of these arguments.

Then I write about it. And after I write about it, I send a draft of what I’ve written to them. Then, if I’m really lucky, we have another argument about the draft I’ve sent them. I think more about this second argument, and refine the draft.

How I would like to tell you that this is how every single post on EFE gets written.

The reality is that all of what I’ve described above happens for maybe one post every month. Those posts, and those arguments stay with me then for a very long time. But the vast majority of the posts you read over here are me reading something, finding it interesting enough to write about it, and well, I write it and you read it.

When the whole process described above works the way it should – that is utopia.

But between living in utopia and not writing about it at all lies a happy medium. Happy not because it is perfect, but because it is attainable. It involves at least one of all those things happening – me reading about something and then writing about it.

So my favorite note-taking app?

It happens to be a blog called EFE. The posts over here are me taking notes on something I’ve read – and that, more than anything else, helps me remember stuff better.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again.

Write.

Write and put it out in the public domain for all to read. Best way to remember something, anything and most everything.

And if you can figure out a way for me to do achieve my utopian process for all the posts that I write, please do tell!

One Sentence and One Sentence Only

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This post is a rewrite of an earlier post, but it is worth writing about it again, for two reasons.

First, it is start of undergrad thesis time at the Gokhale Institute. And second, the point of this post helps people think better, which is always and everywhere a good idea.

What is the post about? It is about being able to describe the point of your work in one short sentence. No conjunctions, no punctuation. In one short simple sentence, tell me what you are up to.

What work? Anything! It could be (ahem) a blog post, or an essay, or an undergraduate thesis, or a PhD thesis, or a movie.

Can you summarize it for me in one sentence?

If you can, you are clear about what you want to do in your work. If you can’t, your own thinking about your work isn’t clear enough.

Try it. It is surprisingly difficult to do, even for a blog post.

How would I summarize this blog post – the one you are reading right now – in one sentence?

Learn the art of summarizing your entire work in one short sentence.

If you do decide to do this, you will very quickly realize that it is torture. You will rebel and revolt and say it is not possible. Imagine me with an insufferably smug look on my face, please. And now imagine me telling you that you must do it.

If, after a long time, you come to me and show me your sentence, but then tell me that this isn’t fair, you really need to tell me more, I will graciously and generously let you write an additional four sentences. These now become the sections in your work.

Now describe each section in one sentence.

Now expand each of these four sentences into four other sentences. These now become the subsections of each section.

And so on.

Particularly in the case of academic work, there is an additional tweak that may prove to be useful.

Answer the three whats.

  1. What specific topic are you writing about?
    Whatever your answer, I will ask if you can make it more specific than that. I will ask you this at least thrice. Whatever your answer at the third time of asking might become the topic you wish to research. But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your topic, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.
  2. What geography?
    Are you analyzing your topic for a specific geography? Could be a locality, a village, a town, a city, a district. Maybe a state. Just about maybe a country, but you’re making me nervous now. If we’re talking continents or the entire world, I congratulate you, but no way are you getting done anytime soon. But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your choice of geography, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.
  3. What time period?
    Are you analyzing the entire time period for which you have data available? Or only a specific interval? If so, which one? Why? But as a thumb rule, remember: whatever your choice of time period, it is too broad to be amenable to serious analysis.

Armed with your one sentence framework, and with clear answers to the three whats, you will struggle to do your work. Work just is that hard, now what to do.

But without these tricks, you will almost certainly struggle even more.

All the best!

Here’s the old blogpost, and here’s a wonderful link from it.

A Call for Help Re: Substack

Ashish1 Comment

What are the pros and cons of moving this blog to Substack?

This blog will forever be free, so I’m not looking to shift in order to monetize anything. But for those of you who have used Substack (and especially for those of you who have used both WordPress and Substack), what can you tell me that the Internet cannot?

Specifically:

  1. In what ways is Substack better, and in what ways is it worse in your experience?
  2. What are the limitations of Substack?
  3. Particularly for those of you who did migrate over to Substack, how complicated was your experience?

Thank you very much in advance!

Blogging Everyday

Ashish4 Comments

I try to blog everyday, and as some of my regular readers might know, I don’t always succeed.

Why do I try to blog everyday?

Many reasons, but here are the top three. First, it helps makes concepts clear in my mind. Second, it instils a sense of discipline. Call it rountine, and I might even accept that it has become an addiction, but in this case, I would say it is entirely worth it. And third, my blog has become my note-taking tool. Increasingly, I end up searching my own blogposts regarding concepts I’m sure I’ve come across before. If it was important to me, I am sure I must have written about it.

There are other advantages – I’ve gotten work as a consequence of writing here, I’ve made friends and I’ve met lots of very interesting people. To cut a long story short, there are many, many advantages and virtually no downsides. You don’t get to be as lazy as you’d like to be, it is true, but people tell me that’s a good thing. Who knows, they may well be right.

There are two people I look up to when it comes to blogging every single day, come rain or shine. The name of one of them is likely to be familiar to many of you – Tyler Cowen, of course.

The other is Seth Godin.

I don’t know for how long now, but Seth has been blogging for easily more than fifteen years at least. And when I say he has been blogging for fifteen years, I mean that he has been blogging every single day for those fifteen years (and probably more). I could look up the exact number, but the point in this case ins’t the statistic itself, it is admiration for being able to keep at it for so long. It’s a habit I admire and envy, and it is a habit I aspire to. And like Jessica Hagy the other day, so also with this post. It is a tribute of sorts, and also a way to introduce some of you to bloggers who I read without fail.

Seth has over the years introduced me to authors, introduced me to concepts, taught me fun ways of thinking about stuff, made me rethink simple math, and above all – and I’ll never be able to thank him enough for this – introduced me to good bread (and do read other posts he has written in honor of Poilane). There’s so much more on his blog that trying to create a list is pointless – as with Jessica’s blog, so also with Seth’s, but even more so. Dip in, and see what catches your fancy.

Above all, though, Seth has taught me three things. He has taught me that everything that I do is marketing. Every single thing. Now, I can tell you that this means I’m not a very good marketer, but the good news is that I have one more reason to try and be better at everything I do. But he also has taught me that marketing isn’t a fad, a gimmick or a thing to be sneered at. On the contrary, it is an indispensable skill.

Two, he has taught me to show up every single day. In fact, the phrase “show up” and the word “ship” I will forever associate with Seth. If you are confused about why a marketer is talking about ships, note that we’re talking about the verb, not the noun – and I’ll reiterate my invitation to dip into his blog. I ship a blogpost daily on this blog – or try to, at any rate, purely because I admire his (and Tyler’s) tenacity and gumption. Read what he had to say about this back in 2013, when he wrote his 5000th (yup, not a typo) post:

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.
The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

https://seths.blog/2013/06/the-5000th-post/

(And as an economist, that second paragraph is so much food for thought!)

And finally, he’s taught me to think daily. This is related to the second point, but this is important enough to be a point all on its own. You see, writing daily becomes a habit if you do it long enough. But even more importantly, you realize very quickly that writing something daily also means having to think daily. And you’d be surprised at how good we all are at going though the day without thinking. If you don’t know what I mean, I invite you to try and write daily.

Thank you for leading by example, Seth, and for showing up everyday.

Write The Harder Version

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Ben Thompson writes a lovely (as usual) essay about the latest Meta-Microsoft partnership. There’s a lot to think about and ponder in that essay, but for the moment, I want to just focus on a part of it that appears in the introduction:

That was why this Article was going to be easy: writing that Meta’s metaverse wasn’t very compelling would slot right in to most people’s mental models, prompting likes and retweets instead of skeptical emails; arguing that Meta should focus on its core business would appeal to shareholders concerned about the money and attention devoted to a vision they feared was unrealistic. Stating that Zuckerberg got it wrong would provide comfortable distance from not just an interview subject but also a company that I have defended in its ongoing dispute with Apple over privacy and advertising.
Indeed, you can sense my skepticism in the most recent episode of Sharp Tech, which was recorded after seeing the video but before trying the Quest Pro. See, that was the turning point: I was really impressed, and that makes this Article much harder to write.

https://stratechery.com/2022/meta-meets-microsoft/

When you’re writing about a particular topic, and particularly if you write often enough, you realize that there are two ways to go about it: the easy way, and the hard way. The easy way isn’t necessarily about slacking off – in fact, part of the reason it might be easy to write is precisely because you haven’t bene slacking off for a long time in terms of writing regularly.

Doing so – writing regularly, that is – gives you a way of thinking about what to write – a mental framework that lays out the broad contours of your write-up, a way to begin the first paragraph, and even a nice rhetorical flourish with which to end.

I speak from personal experience – every now and then, I can see the blogpost that will be written by me while I’m reading something. And this is a truly wonderful superpower – the ability to know that you can churn out a somewhat decent-ish piece about something in very short order. Which is why both writing regularly and writing with self-imposed deadlines is on balance a good thing.

But there is, alas, no such thing as a free lunch. The downside of this is that one also then develops the inability to push oneself more. Why bother coming up with a different way of thinking what to write about, and how to go about it? Even if you’ve developed the intuition while reading something that your regular mental framework will do just fine, and it might well be what your audience is expecting from you anyways, you know that you really should be framing it in a different way. Either because that’s really what the subject matter at hand demands, or because you’re somehow convinced that this new, different way will result in a better framing – but you just know it in your bones.

That’s the hard bit: should you then stick to what you know and thump out a piece, or should you take the time to pause, reflect and push yourself to build out a better essay? Should you pursue that contrarian take, even though it might take longer?

And if you have a regular schedule to keep up with, the answer need not necessarily be yes. But I would argue that every now and then, it does make sense to take a step back, allow yourself the luxury of time, and write the more difficult piece instead.

Yes it will take longer, and yes it will be more tiring, but now what to do. Such is life.

All that being said, three quick points about Ben’s essay that really stood out for me:

  1. What is Mark Zuckerberg optimizing for with this move, and what cost to himself and his firm? Why? Weirdly, it would seem as if he is pushing the technology (VR) at the cost of at least the short-term growth of his firm, and he seems to be fine with it. Huh.
  2. Who are likely to be the early adopters of your service, and how likely are they to eventually become your marketers for free is a question that never goes away, but remains underrated.
  3. I’ve never used a VR headset, but even after reading Ben’s article, it becomes difficult to see why this might take off at current costs – and those costs aren’t just monetary, but also about mass adoption, inconveniences and technological limitations. I just don’t get it (which, of course, is a good thing. More to learn!)

Showing Up For Work

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I ended up not posting on these pages this past Wednesday.

I’m not proud of it, and I wished I had posted on that day, but let’s talk about showing up for work. The phrase isn’t mine, in the sense that I associate it with Seth Godin. And this practice, of trying to write here every weekday, and post links to interesting Twitter threads and videos over the weekend, is partly because of Seth’s practice of writing daily without fail. And also, of course, due to that other blog that has daily updates, come rain or shine.

And trust me, it is hard to do! I don’t feel quite so bad about not posting for long stretches over the past two years, because there were days where I simply didn’t feel like writing. And I was completely fine with that. But this past Wednesday, it was part laziness, part lots of other things to do, and part logistical issues.

But I should stop wussing around and ‘fess up. These are all excuses, and if I aim to post daily, then failure to post is I not prioritizing this task above all else. Generally speaking, I try to schedule posts a week ahead, and a good Friday is when I have posts lined up all through next Sunday.

But alas, this doesn’t always happen. And so you might see me hunched up over my laptop, a gently sympathetic cup of coffee next to me in a café, typing away furiously to meet my self-imposed deadline of posting by ten am. A bad day is one on which I miss the deadline, and a horrible day is one on which I don’t post at all.

The reason I’m writing this post today, and the reason I’ve spoken at length about my failure this past Wednesday, is because I want to leave you with two messages:

  1. If you write (and preferably post publicly) regularly for long enough, you will reach a stage where it becomes an almost compulsive habit, and that is A Very Good Thing. As Seth himself says, there is no such thing as writer’s block. Just sit and write. Some days will be diamonds and some will be stones, but the point is to first write. Worry about quality later.
  2. If you feel as bad as I do about missing a day, that is An Even Better Thing! But keep at it, and show up for work the next day, and then the day after, and then the day after that. Each day is, as it were, a marginal revolution.

And while you are at it, wish me luck. For today is Friday, and I don’t yet have any posts scheduled for next week.

Ah well, onwards!

Learning by Writing (But There’s More!)

Ashish1 Comment

As you might imagine, I’m a big fan of the idea of learning by writing, and preferably, writing for public consumption.

Writing is its own discipline, and it is a wonderful way to make thoughts and concepts clear in your own head. And writing for public consumption forces you to be clearer in terms of how you frame your thoughts, and the internet acts as an extremely alert editor for free. Trust me, writing your thoughts down is great. Try it!

But there’s ways and means to make this process even better, and I chanced upon a nice little essay that gives advice on just this very point:

I usually start by trying to read the most prominent 1-3 pieces that (a) defend the claim or (b) attack the claim or (c) set out to comprehensively review the evidence on both sides. I try to understand the major reasons they’re giving for the side they come down on. I also chat about the topic with people who know more about it than I do, and who aren’t too high-stakes to chat with.

https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/

The essay is titled “Learning by Writing“, but I interpret it more as an essay about how to get better at learning by writing. That is, I think the essay is about how to get better at the process of writing – the fact that you will learn by doing so is all but guaranteed.

And to me, the most important part of the process of writing is the quote above, and in particular, the following: “I also chat about the topic with people who know more about it than I do, and who aren’t too high-stakes to chat with”.

Blogging, and writing more generally, is a very solitary endeavour. Reading 1-3 pieces is the easy bit, and is a lot of fun to do. I tend to be a very opinionated reader, so forming an opinion or a hypothesis one way or the other isn’t difficult to do. Taking a contrarian position – a position that is at odds with your take on the issue – is rather more difficult, but I have found it entirely worth my while.

But that last bit – chatting with people who more about it than I do, and who aren’t too high-stakes to chat with, that bit is difficult. Lots of people know much more than I do about lots of things, so there’s no shortage of supply in that regard, but the “aren’t too high stakes to chat with” isn’t easy.

Also, given the fact that I try to post everyday, and my, shall we say, above average procrastination skills make it difficult to meet the deadline of posting on time and having conversations about what I am going to write about.

But in the cases where I manage to do so (chat about what I am going to write about with friends/mentors/experts), I find my own writing to be noticeable better. So not for all posts that will follow, but at least for some of them, I shall try and do exactly this: chat with folks who know a bit about the topic, before writing about it.

The rest of the essay isn’t actually about the point that I have raised over here, but it is still worth a read. Shown below is a table of the author’s outline for writing a piece:

https://www.cold-takes.com/learning-by-writing/

Again, I don’t think something like this can/will work on a daily posting schedule, but at least one post a week?

Onwards!

Simplify. Then Simplify More. And Then Some More.

AshishLeave a comment

I try and post daily here on EFE, and as regular readers may have noticed, don’t always succeed.

I would like to try and write daily, which is a whole other challenge. But I cannot always manage to do so, alas. And let me be clear, the reason I can’t manage either is not because of my other commitments, or my regular job, or anything like that. It is simply because I am not good enough at managing my time well.

It is, for example, 10.03 am as I’m typing this out, and today’s blog should have gone out at 10.00 am. Better late than never, I am consoling myself as I type this out.

So it goes.

One major downside of trying to write/post daily – beyond the fact that I find it difficult to build this habit – is that I am certainly unable to read through my posts once before posting. In an ideal world, I would like to sit down with each post a day after I have written it, and go over it in detail. I would like to scrub out the unnecessary adverbs, rewrite passive sentences into active ones, adjust the length of the sentences so that they sound better, and so much more from a grammatical and aesthetic perspective.

But above all, I would like to be able to take out the time to make sure that what I’ve written is clear, concise and comprehensible.

I’ve christened this blog EconforEverybody. And at least some of my posts, I am sure, aren’t for everybody. Folks without a background in econ theory might not get them, or might be turned away by the opening paragraph, or hell, even the title. And even if they do make it past these hurdles, the topic may still prove too complicated for them.

So two things for me to note, then. One, try and write as simply as possible. An admonishment that I have regularly handed out to one of my favorite students is one that I should follow myself: shorter sentences always. Simpler words, too.

Two, before clicking on the “Publish” button, try and read the whole thing once. Try and eliminate the obvious errors, at the very least. And if you can find the time to make it even simpler, please, go ahead and do so.

If I can make this a habit, my writing elsewhere will benefit too. And that can only be a good thing.

So when I write, I must simplify. Then simplify more. And then some more.

Onwards!

Make Examinations Relevant Again

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Alice Evans (and if you are unfamiliar with her work, here’s a great way to begin learning more about it) recently tweeted about a topic that is close to my heart:

And one of the replies was fascinating:

I’ve asked students to create podcasts in the past for assignments, but not yet for final or semester end examinations, because I am constrained by the rules of whichever university I’m teaching in. There are some that allow for experimentation and off-the-beaten-path formats, but the vast majority are still in “Answer the following” mode.

But ever since I came across that tweet, I’ve been thinking about how we could make examinations in this country better, more relevant, and design them in such a way that we test skills that are applicable to the world we live in today, rather than the world of a 100 years ago.

To me, the ideal examination would include the following:

  • The ability to do fast-paced research on a collaborative basis
  • The ability to work as a team to be able to come up with output on the basis of this research
  • The ability to write (cogently and concisely) about how you as an individual think about the work that your team came up with

What might such an examination look like? Well, it could take many forms, but here’s one particular form that I have been thinking about.

Imagine an examination for a subject like, say, macroeconomics. Here’s a question I would love to ask students to think about for such an examination today. “Do you and your team find yourself on Team Transitory or Team Persistent when it comes to inflation today? The answer, in whatever format, should make sense to a person almost entirely unacquainted with economics.”

This would be a three hour long examination. Say the exam is for a cohort of 120 students. I’d split the class up into 10 groups of 12 each, and ask each group to spend one hour thinking about this question, and doing the research necessary to come up with an answer. They can discuss the question, split the work up (refer to textbooks, refer to material online, watch YouTube videos, discuss with each other, appoint a leader – whatever it is that they need to do) and come up with an outline of what their answer is.

The next hour would be coming up with the answer itself: write a blogpost about it, or record audio, or record video. The format is up to them, as is the length. The only requirement is that the output must answer the question, and must include reasons for their choice. Whether the background information that is required to make sense is to be given (or referenced, or skipped altogether) is entirely up to the students.

And the final hour must be spent on a short write-up where each individual student submits their view about their team’s submission. Given that the second hour’s output was collaborative, does the student as an individual agree with the work done? Why? Or why not? What would the student have liked to have done differently? This part must be written, for the ability to write well is (to me) non-negotiable.

To me, this examination will encompass research (which can only be done in an hour if the students are familiar enough with the subject at hand, so they need to have done their homework), collaboration and the ability to think critically about the work that they were a part of. Grading could be split equally on a fifty-fifty basis: half for the work done collaboratively, and half for the individual essay submission.

Sure, there would be some problems. Students might object to the groups that have been formed or students might end up quarreling so much in the first two hours that they’re not left with much time. Or something else altogether, which is impossible to foresee right now.

But I would argue that such examinations are more reflective of the work that the students will actually do in the world outside. More reflective than “Answer the following” type questions, that is.

The point isn’t to defend this particular format. The point is to ask if the current format needs to change (yes!) and if so how (this being only one suggestion).

Right now, examinations provide a 19th century solution to very real 21st century problems, and their irrelevance becomes ever more glaring by the day.

We need to talk about examinations, and we aren’t.

Observe, and Ask

Ashish2 Comments

Most students who take introductory economics seem to leave the course without really having learned even the most important basic economic principles. For example, their ability to answer simple economic questions several months after leaving the course is not measurably different from that of people who never took a principles course (Hansen, Salemi and Siegfried 2002). The problem seems to be that instructors of principles courses almost always try to teach students far too much. In the process, really important ideas get no more coverage than minor ones. Everything ends up going by in a blur

Frank, R. H. (2006). The economic naturalist writing assignment. The Journal of Economic Education, 37(1), 58-67.

So begins a paper called “The Economic Naturalist Writing Assignment”, a paper that everybody can (and dare I say should) read. Robert Frank has forgotten more about teaching principles of economics than most of us will ever learn. 48 years of teaching, so that last sentence isn’t rhetorical.

A successful economics learning experience should mirror these same steps. A short list of basic principles should be presented to students, one at a time in the context of simple examples drawn from familiar settings. Following each, students should be asked to practice the principle by using it to solve simple problems that are closely parallel to the ones used to illustrate the principle. The student should then be given the opportunity to pose original questions and use the same basic principles to answer them.

Frank, R. H. (2006). The economic naturalist writing assignment. The Journal of Economic Education, 37(1), 58-67.

Readers who are familiar with the book The Economic Naturalist will have guessed where this is going. For years, Professor Frank asked his students to write essays about things they saw around them that they found puzzling, interesting, or counterintuitive. The point of the essays was to, well, observe and ask. And then, using the principles of economics that had just been taught to them, try and come up with answers.

A really successful paper is one that begins with a really interesting question (one that makes the listener instantly curious to learn the answer) and then uses an economic principle or principles to construct a plausible answer. You’ll know you have a good paper if the first thing your roommate wants to do upon reading it is to tell friends about it.

Frank, R. H. (2006). The economic naturalist writing assignment. The Journal of Economic Education, 37(1), 58-67.

What kind of questions? Here are just two (the names in parentheses are of the students who asked the question, and went on to answer them in their essays):

  1. Why do brides spend so much money on wedding dresses, whereas grooms often rent cheap tuxedos, even though grooms could potentially wear their tuxedos on many other occasions and brides will never wear their dresses again?
    (Jennifer Dulski)
  2. Why are round-trip fares from Hawaii to the mainland higher than the corresponding fares from the mainland to Hawaii? (Karen Hittle)

Curious to hear the answers? Please, read the paper as an appetizer, and for the mains, buy the book.

In the paper I have been excerpting from, Professor Frank uses the analogy of how tennis is taught to beginners, beginning with basic drills (of which the forehand comes first).

Those who aspire to move their games to a higher level typically continue with formal instruction. However, for them, too, an important part of the learning process is continued play.

Same as earlier, which is what ibid means

Now, about that “continued play” being an important part of the learning process, Tyler Cowen has a post out today, titled “Why do they keep the books wrapped in Mexican bookstores?“:

Yes, wrapped in clear shrink wrap. So you can’t page through them and see what the book might be like. I can think of a few hypotheses:
They don’t want you standing in the bookstore reading the thing, rather than buying it. A bit like some U.S. comics news stands in days past. Yet this doesn’t seem so plausible for longer books or most novels.
They want the books to look nicer and less grimy.
How about price discrimination?

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/07/why-do-they-keep-the-books-wrapped-in-mexican-bookstores.html

If Tyler Cowen can take the time out to practice his forehand, surely the rest of us can also train like athletes?

Principles of economics can be learnt for free online, using any resource of your choice. I’m not linking to any specific one because I want to make the point that you can very, very easily choose a resource, and it will likely be great.

But better still, principles of economics can be practiced very easily too! What are you waiting for? 🙂

Finally: Crosswords (at least the one closest to my home) wraps some books in clear shrink wrap, but not others. Does anybody know why?