Narrative drives most of economics. Everything seems to be part of a story, and how that story is told often leads to critical error.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The economics profession advances by one confusing financial disaster at a time.
Narrative is so rich; it's given up so much.
Economics is a strange science. Our subject deals with some of the most important as well as mundane issues that impinge on the human condition.
I started in business journalism from the outside, so when I started writing about markets and business, I was struck by the fact that markets seemed to work well even though people are often irrational, lack good information and are not perfect in the way they think about decisions.
When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.
Economics is mostly how humans rationalize who gets what and why. It's how we instantiate our preferences about status, privileges, and power.
The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.
The economic sense of possibility was so great when I was growing up that my parents had no question that I could do anything I wanted to do, even as a girl. I've always believed that the economics of a story intersects with the women's story - that stuff often happens at the time it happens because of the economy.
There's a very good reason for why economics developed the way it did, and that is that in many situations, the assumption that people will exploit the opportunities available to them is very plausible, and it simplifies the analysis of how markets will behave.
Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.