Flipchart Rick has a post up about Andy Haldane’s speech the other day and, like all Haldane’s work, it’s witty and engaging so you should definitely read it. The subject is the recent slowdown in growth in the developed world and it illustrates how different views of the same data can lead to very different conclusions.
Haldane plots the last 3000 years of GDP to show what a recent phenomenon exponential growth is:
During the nomination round this year I kept hearing the same questions coming up. Who am I supposed to nominate? Why would I nominate someone? How can I mix the ideas of economics and sexiness?
As this is an economics blog the vast majority of these comments came from economists or people with a strong interest in economics. Now I’m yet to meet a person who “does” economics at either a professional or amateur level whose focus is on money or status. Instead the interest in economics, and the corresponding study of economics, has come from an interest in understanding the social world – and a desire to understand if there is some way of making it better.
As a result, motivating nominations was easy, all I had to do was tell people to nominate an economist who has helped them to satisfy this desire to understand the world – specifically New Zealand. What New Zealand economist has offered you insight into the world, and motivated you to dig deeper into your own understanding of the New Zealand economy and society. That is where economics meets sexy.
With that in mind the nomination process is over. Now it is down to you, dear reader, to determine which of these 20 economists most closely satisfies your personal definition of sexy – your choices will decide who wins “New Zealand’s Sexiest Economist 2015” (NZSE15).
