Joshua Gans revisits life among the econ, 50 years after the classic investigation by Axel Leijonhufvud.
In Leijonhufvud’s time, economics was dominated by two super-castes which worshipped totally different totems.
At the moment, nonetheless, the super-castes are hardly to be seen and the previous totems have been changed by a singular new totem:
The expertise powering the Econ runs on one treasured useful resource, d’ta, and the work of acquiring that d’ta rests with the grads. Upon arrival within the dept, they’re instantly despatched into the D’ta Mines and tasked with amassing seemingly inconceivable portions of the useful resource. They toil in soiled and unsanitary situations. Sarcastically, their subsequent process is to painstakingly clear and polish the d’ta they’ve extracted one after the other — generally tens of millions of particular person gadgets — to allow them to then be sorted and made accessible for processing. With luck, the grads could also be assigned processing duties that happen in windowless rooms twenty-four hours a day working a single machine. The hope is that they’ll then produce the brand new excessive achievement of the Econ, a tabl. It’s exhausting to explain what a tabl is to outsiders, but it surely represents the end result of finely processed d’ta. The extra the tabl incorporates brilliant, bejewelling within the type of star-like symbols (*), the extra precious it’s. Failure to create a sufficiently dazzled tabl means being despatched again to the mines.
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