Economics in Action

So you want to be an investment banker?

Banking and finance are a common destination for economics graduates. Banks value economist’s as they have quantitative skills as well as an analytical flair and a good business knowledge.

On good website to see what a life in investment banking is really like visit a great website we found called ‘mergers and inquisitions’ detailing every thing from investment banking ‘lingo’ to an average day and of course the pay- it’s a good starting point for those who want to know models about this highly demanding but very well paid career.

Another great site is the Deuchste bank website which have published this guide

Of course if you don’t fancy doing something like Banking there is a wide variety of subjects which can be studied

A great new page from our friends at Intute Social Sciences and the Economics Network is up! Useful for degree or A-levels students, it tours some of the key sites for Economics and shows you how to make use of them in your work.

You can find it at: The Internet for Economics.

Is economics useless?

So given all the recent ‘mess’ in world economy what value does ‘modern’ economics have to offer us?  Well it depends on who you ask. Here Stephanie Flanders offers some news and views on whether economics is a ‘busted flush’.

For those of you who don’t/cant be bothered to read the whole thing her argument in a paragraph

‘So, all in all, not an edifying list of complaints. But does that mean economics is a busted flush? I’m afraid not, because even if you think economics got a lot of this stuff wrong, you’d be hard-pressed to understand – or to fix – what’s happening in the global economy today without it. ‘

Maybe it’s not such a good time to be an economist. But it’s one helluva time to study economics.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/stephanieflanders/2009/07/is_economics_a_busted_flush.html

Jobs for graduates- from any discipline- are not as plentiful as they were 2 years ago. After 40 failed job interviews, economics graduate Daniel Seddiqui was fed up and decided to experience lots of different jobs in a short amount of time, 50 jobs in 50 states in 50 weeks.

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Economics is a subject in its own right but it is well known for incorporating other disciplines including sociology, philosophy, politics and maths. Maths in particular is integral to economics.

For some reason maths isn’t often seen as the fascinating subject it is. It allows us to build bridges, measure stars, play hopscotch, make cars, cook; the list seems endless. Economics uses maths to frame and test its theories.

The Radio 4 show More or Less which “is devoted to the powerful, sometimes beautiful, often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers” asked well-known guests and contributors to say why they love numbers. The short films include Konnie Huq, Vince Cable and Rick Edwards.

28-year-old Jess Bachman is not only an excellent graphic designer but also has a great understanding of numbers. His site WallStats showcases his work making detailed, colourful charts about economics and politics, including the Fall of General Motors and the Current Financial Crisis. The Evolution of the Household 1950 to today is nearly ten thousand pixels tall and traces the evolution of style as well as lifestyle. He is most proud of Death and Taxes which illustrates US Federal spending in incredible detail.

Fat Boy
by mandj98
on Flickr

What would you do with a database of the weights, measurements and life histories of fourteen thousand people? Economic historian Marco Sunder used them to relate life expectancy to Body Mass Index. He reached the surprising conclusion that slightly “overweight” people lived longer.

Nobody’s implying that healthy eating and regular exercise are bad for you. All the advice is that these are worth doing for good reasons but what Sunder found, and was borne out by subsequent medical research, was that people dieting excessively to bring their bodies into the “normal” range were decreasing their life expectancies.

This is one of many intriguing, succinct and occasionally odd economic ideas in “Economics 2.0: What the best minds in Economics can teach you about business and life,” a book released this year by economics journalists Norbert Häring and Olef Storbeck. Other topics they explore include The Economics of Beauty, Why Economists love Sports, How Bad Will the Financial Crisis Get and why Europeans were a great deal shorter in the 17th Century.

Priceless? Free? Surely it differs on what you buy your true love? And why would you try to put a price on it?

Photo by spud on Flickr

The 12 days of Christmas, a popular Christmas song, begins with the line ‘On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me’. An American investment group PNC Wealth Management compile a Christmas Price Index (CPI) every year. Taking the meaning of the song quite literally they calculate the cost of true love.

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Photo by Gaetan Lee on Flickr

Each choice that you make as an individual is decided by a society of billions: namely, the billions of neurons that populate your brain. Economics, being the science of choice, has until recently treated the human being as a black box rather than looking inside. That has changed with the advent of neuroeconomics, a branch of science which examines what those cells are doing when people are making choices.

Neuroeconomists have studied blood-flow to find where the brain measures uncertainty; measured hormones in subjects’ saliva and their effect on impulsive decisions; and worn conductive caps to measure brain activity while they make a purchase.

The questions thrown up by neuroeconomics include whether we are really rational, or destined to be biased, and whether it will be possible in the future to read off someone’s preferences with a powerful brain scan. In an article for Slate and a recent programme on BBC Radio 4, Tim Harford discusses the potential power of this emerging discipline.

Tim Harford writes both the ‘Undercover Economist‘ and ‘Dear Economist‘ for the Financial Times.

Add contemporary art to the long list of topics that have been illuminated by economics research. Don Thompson of York University, Toronto has studied this market and in his new book, “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark”, examines why art prices reach such staggering heights. Just weeks ago, Damien Hirst auctioned his “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever” collection for nearly two hundred million dollars: enough to buy 272,108 metric tons of rice. Professor Thompson graciously agreed to an interview:

Photo by diametrik on Flickr

What made you study economics in the first place?

It was probably one of those undergraduate surprises; I took a micro course, enjoyed it, took a course in European Economic History and loved it, took a macro course, and launched on a career.

Has being an economist changed the way you appreciate art?

No, you still lust after art that touches your soul that, you want to live with and wake up to. However, knowing the prices of art affects how you look at it, particularly in a contemporary art museum. The “if one like that sold for $20 million there must be something there I haven’t seen, I’ll look harder and reach hard” syndrome is hard to avoid.

Is the economics of contemporary art like other areas of economics, or did you have to build it from the ground up?

I spent a year working on The $12 Million Stuffed Shark because I did not understand how artists got selected to rise to the highest levels (being sold in Sotheby’s or Christie’s evening contemporary auctions), or why prices were 10 or 100 times what seemed reasonable in the absence of scarcity. And because of my profession and personal curiosity, I wanted to learn more.