Why is economics so complicated?
Is it just me, or is economics really complicated? For the life of me, I’ve been trying to figure out how to wrap my head around it, and have even gone as far as to major in it, in college. I graduated in 2017, and yet I still don’t think that economics as a discipline is presented in a way that’s accessible to me, much less to the average person.
I guess economics is just supposed to be complicated… but why is that?
When you are able to fully grasp economic principles, it enables you to make better life decisions that primarily affect your wallet and your socioeconomic position now, but more importantly, the socioeconomic trajectory of your family’s future generations. And as I’ll touch on later, people who inherit wealth are more likely to not only do better in their lives but to then pass on wealth to their future generations, never having to experience poverty. And as we all know, poverty is the killer of all dreams (not to say that it’s impossible to escape, but escaping a cycle of poverty is extremely difficult, and the majority of those in it, do not escape).
Like most people, I’ve spent the majority of my life up until this point spending frivolously on items that social media told me that I wanted, as well as on experiences that were worthy of rubbing in the faces of my virtual friends. To put it lightly — it’s expensive to be a millennial (lol). In recent months, however, something happened — call it a Jesus intervention (because… that’s exactly what it was) — that made me isolate myself and re-evaluate what was really important to me, versus what was total bullshit propagated by the internet and social media. I’m happy to say that I’ve since emerged from my spiritual hibernation and discovered what I kind of knew already, but was too afraid to embrace: I love writing & thinking about capitalism, economics, and startups.
Now, back to what I was saying about economics being complicated —
I started reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty yesterday, and while I love the content of the book, I know that it won’t be for everyone. Especially so for a casual reader because it is well over 700 pages long, and requires at least some profound interest in economics in order to propel you through the mere length of the book, as well as some basic economic equations that you’ll probably never use in your life. And therein lies the problem: economics seems to only be written for those who already like economics, not for those who didn’t know that they’d like economics and actually really need to understand it.
It’s time that someone changes that. Do you smell what I smell… disruption, anyone?
Economics in the US has really dissolved into this uppity discipline, where unless you know complex mathematical models, “you can’t sit with us,” as Gretchen and Karen famously once said. As Piketty notes in Capital in the Twenty-First Century:
“The truth is that economics should never have sought to divorce itself from the other social sciences and can advance only in conjunction with them… if we are to progress in our understanding of the historical dynamics of the wealth distribution and the structure of social classes, we must obviously take a pragmatic approach and avail ourselves of the methods of historians, sociologists, and political scientists as well as economists.”
It’s about time that everyone is able to understand basic economic principles without needing to sift through a 700+ page book. Don’t we all want to improve our social classes and become more wealthy?
Now we can by learning more about economics and empowering ourselves through education.
