You can quote me later!

I remember that some two years ago I was doing the regular shower time thinking, and kept hoping that there would come an answer as to how to incentivize truth telling - because people just were not doing it enough! So, I was thinking of how to create such an environment. I did not know then that there are economists that have theorized on creating such self-enforcements.

I also remember a friend once saying, "I like to have my space to be able to lie." I thought that was a cop-out justification for lying because I felt that this particular person did not even make enough of an attempt to tell the truth. Small opinion of mine. Moving on. I knew that that sentence stood out to me because there was something deep embedded in it.

Back to economists creating these systems to self-enforce truth-telling. An enforcement is being designed by someone other than the self, still. And perhaps always. 

I'd like to patent my next realization today by self-quoting:

"As much as I love Truth, if I was ever forced to tell the Truth, I'd most certainly lie."

I guess there is something that runs through human veins deeper than Truth - Free Will. "Choice" is a super underrated word in my humble opinion. I think it is written in some book that the Truth will make you free - but I'd add my little tid bit: only if we are also free to lie.

No one quite says it like Carrie

The Optimist Economist

I’m just going to do a quick run through of some definitions and some rooting back of words. Economics has been defined as “the allocation of scarce resources” for as long as I can remember.

I looked it up recently because as economic graduate students, my classmates and I are always talking about optimization. Some of us really do enjoy talking about how to optimize every decision we take in our routine life. I hear so much about optimization, yet I was shocked that my program was filled with few optimistic thoughts. Optimization is the maximization of the benefit desired, given some constraints. However, to my surprise, people in Economics seem to focus more on counting constraints instead of the optimization.

I have often been disheartened when the world places unnecessary constraints on themselves and on others – even if these constraints exist only mentally. I think they affect our decision-making process, and our ability to truly make the best of our situations, because I think our situations may often be better than we realize.
 
It is especially heart-breaking to see economists place these limits. It is as though the resources themselves have been made scarce. Allocation of these “scarce” resources can hardly be considered maximization without a proper evaluation of the constraints. Constraints must be exogenous of nature, not chosen (at least not in terms of quantity).

When I was growing up, I thought of myself as an optimist. I set out in the world to discover myself, and I landed up really connecting to the field of economics. My graduate studies brought me closer to the realization that this is exactly what I am supposed to study – this is what has always been natural to me – to make the best of the little (or a lot) that I have. When I’m viewed as too idealistic or too optimistic by my peers, it is a bit discouraging, but I don’t let that become a constraint – and this is part of my optimization as an economist. I chose my advisor because he's the type of person who would subtly point out to my classmate that the research question is not posing a "problem", but posing the "next step".

Economists will know what I mean when they are reminded of the etymology of the term, “optimism”: 1759 (in translations of Voltaire), from French optimisme (1737), from Modern Latin optimum, used by Gottfried Leibniz (in "Théodicée," 1710) to mean "the greatest good," from Latin optimus "the best". The doctrine holds that the actual world is the "best of all possible worlds," in which the creator accomplishes the most good at the cost of the least evil. Sound a bit like Pareto?

A true economist must be an optimist! And apparently a great household manager! The etymology of "economist": 1580s, "household manager," from Middle French économiste; meaning "student of political economy" is from 1804;1580s, "art of managing a household," perhaps from French économique.

References: Dictionary.com and Etymology.com