Mike Brandl's
Take On All Things Economics

John Maynard Keynes once wrote:

“The master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher—in some degree. He must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular, in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in the light of the past for the purposes of the future. No part of man’s nature or his institutions must be entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near to earth as a politician.”
~ The Economic Journal, September 1924

Sadly today most economists are not what Keynes described as “the master economist.” Instead the vast majority of us are siloed: hyper-specialists who have little no understanding of what happens outside in “reality.” I try to be a bit more of what Keynes had in mind.