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When I got an Econ BS, the joke went that it was a rebellion against my dad, an internal auditor, so as to become his nemesis. Pithy explanation: Internal auditors find people who are falsifying numbers to embezzle or cover up misdeeds. Economists have an unsettling tendency to make up numbers for things that aren't easily quantified, and to hold that you'd be a fool not to cheat if you could get away with it.
I am not that kind of economist; I remain more temperamentally like an auditor. But the reason the joke works (or doesn't work at all) is that I doubt very many people would draw a distinction between what Dad and I do if you hand us a sheet of numbers and ask us to find trends and patterns. (Along similar lines, I tend to identify as a white-hat hacker, or used to, and Dad worked in network security. NEMESIS I TELL YOU, although again we'd pretty much be using the same tools and trying to acheive the same ends.)
However it seems to me my natural enemy as an economist is not actually auditors but dudes who give personal finance advice. I say dudes because they have an extra layer of unexamined privilege on top of the other glaring oversights that characterize personal finance advisors. I imagine personal finance advisors are very helpful when they have wealthy, individualized clients, but when they try to talk about what the average person should do, they tend to enter a fantasy land where tradeoffs don't exist and human beings aren't rational actors. (Central tenet of microeconomics: the average human being is a rational actor and makes purchasing decisions based on what they believe will most benefit them, although not always with perfect information).
Today on NPR, I heard one of them literally say it should be easy for someone to save $600 a month by cutting out lattes.
WHAT KIND OF LATTES ARE YOU DRINKING
But also maybe I need those lattes to stay awake and do my job, without which I have no income to save? Or if I don't buy those lattes, I can't hang out at the coffee shop and use the free wifi, or meet with business associates? Or maybe I'm counting on that daily serving of calcium in a form that is easily absorbed, without which I would develop costly osteoporosis? I'm just spitballing, here.
Also, man, your definition of investment as deferred consumption . . . I don't even know where to start with that. The extent to which that is a preposterous definition of investment rapidly approaches infinity.
I am not that kind of economist; I remain more temperamentally like an auditor. But the reason the joke works (or doesn't work at all) is that I doubt very many people would draw a distinction between what Dad and I do if you hand us a sheet of numbers and ask us to find trends and patterns. (Along similar lines, I tend to identify as a white-hat hacker, or used to, and Dad worked in network security. NEMESIS I TELL YOU, although again we'd pretty much be using the same tools and trying to acheive the same ends.)
However it seems to me my natural enemy as an economist is not actually auditors but dudes who give personal finance advice. I say dudes because they have an extra layer of unexamined privilege on top of the other glaring oversights that characterize personal finance advisors. I imagine personal finance advisors are very helpful when they have wealthy, individualized clients, but when they try to talk about what the average person should do, they tend to enter a fantasy land where tradeoffs don't exist and human beings aren't rational actors. (Central tenet of microeconomics: the average human being is a rational actor and makes purchasing decisions based on what they believe will most benefit them, although not always with perfect information).
Today on NPR, I heard one of them literally say it should be easy for someone to save $600 a month by cutting out lattes.
WHAT KIND OF LATTES ARE YOU DRINKING
But also maybe I need those lattes to stay awake and do my job, without which I have no income to save? Or if I don't buy those lattes, I can't hang out at the coffee shop and use the free wifi, or meet with business associates? Or maybe I'm counting on that daily serving of calcium in a form that is easily absorbed, without which I would develop costly osteoporosis? I'm just spitballing, here.
Also, man, your definition of investment as deferred consumption . . . I don't even know where to start with that. The extent to which that is a preposterous definition of investment rapidly approaches infinity.
