2024 life update and what is to come

Well… it has been a little while since my last post. I have a lot that I want to write about both in terms of economics and updates about what has been going on in my life. The first thing I want to talk about is my relationship with reading. It has not been a consistent habit of mine throughout college. There were only a few select books that interested me enough to finish them. I really recommend Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Other than my senior year of high school, I had not read much throughout high school either. This habit was partially disrupted by the sense that as I matured, I was supposed to read more “mature” books; non-fiction books about how the world works and how to be a more knowledgeable member of society.

I have an inkling as to why I thought this way, probably a combination of parental disdain towards reading fiction (which is no longer the case but was back in the day) and seeing other very smart people reading textbooks in their free time, but as I’ve matured more now and gotten more involved into academia (I can only really speak to econ and finance though, don’t know too much about any other research fields) I’ve realized that after a certain point of knowledge accumulation and “intelligence” that creativity matters a lot more in making the next greatest contribution to the field and that this is what most people struggle with.

Although I have still to prove to myself my creativity in econ, I feel like I’ve always been a pretty creative person from birthday gifts to projects in high school which, in large part, is due to how much I read as a kid. Even now from time to time, I remember random tidbits of knowledge that I learned from reading fiction. Regardless, I now have a bit more refined view towards reading other than the immediate characterization that fiction is for kids and non-fiction is for “mature” adults. Obviously it matters a bit more about what type of stuff someone is into, but for me, I realize that I should stick to stuff that gives me enjoyment and to me, that is reading anything I want unrestricted by the genre (which ends up being science fiction most of the time (on a side note: isn’t it interesting how we don’t have a word for books about real events and facts other than “not something else”, to me this honestly speaks to how important fiction is in the world of literature)).

Beyond that though, I’ve realized that the books that I’ve been reading recently have been giving me a lot of research ideas and even a philosophical direction for what I want my research to achieve. That is, more specifically this idea of longtermism. I didn’t know the specific phrase for the idea until I started reading this book: What we owe the future by William MacAskill (as recommended by friend named after Superman) but it was a concept that has been festering inside me the past year or so and really crystalized after I read the second book in the Remembrance of Earth’s Past series (called The Dark Forest) by Liu Cixin. To me, the future is a really cool place (an understatement, at the very least) and I want to do things that primarily contribute towards pushing us towards that place. Something I have grappled with in the past couple of months is that my areas of academic interest and experience isn’t one of the hard sciences that would seem to have direct applications on the real world. I know that economics is my passion and what I’m good at thinking about and there is little I can do to change that even if I wanted to (which I don’t) and so I have to now take it upon myself to actively find ways that my research can also satisfy my identity as a “longterm-ist”.

All that being said, I am in the process of chef-ing up a lot of econ posts (I am cooking, which is a very good transition into the next paragraph) but they will take time and as always I still got to get through two main non-econ related projects that won’t be going up on this website before I can go full steam ahead on the others in store.

Another thing I want to mention before I close off for now is that I’ll be starting a blog post series called “The Pittsburgh Palate”. I’ve done a bit of reflection on what are my main passions (just things that give me a lot of joy and satisfaction after engaging in) and have realized that one of the main ones is cooking and learning about all various cuisines around the world (if anyone reading this knows me and is looking to get me a gift, I have an amazon wish list of kitchen related stuff that I want). I am also aware that “The Pittsburgh Palate” is an interesting choice for a name given that I am now in NYC and that most people agree that NYC is far more culinarily diverse and deep than Pittsburgh (I probably will still document some of my food experiences in NYC on this same Pittsburgh Palate section), but during my time in Pittsburgh I made it a personal goal of mine to experience as much of each of the neighborhoods and their respective food scenes as well: not to be conceited, but I consider myself to be quite the Pittsburgh food connoisseur. Eat food. It is good.