HARRY NOTARAS - PERSONAL ECONOMIST
My economics is personal. It is my first professional love, and it has provided me with that rare opportunity which is to mix passion with work while not letting one destroy the other. As a personal economist, the approach I take with economics has been to lift it from the theoretical world which has made it rather dry and caused it to be pilloried as not useful and to pluck from it the golden nuggets of clarity that allows us to look at our lives differently and through doing so make them better.
Before the rise of impenetrable mathematical models that make economics so difficult to use as an everyday tool, there was a world where the fathers and mothers of economic literature would learn and teach using anecdotes and stories. They would note the behaviours of those around them. As a personal economist, I draw inspiration from these early economists and use their approach to make economics more accessible.
They did not have the information to hand as refined as it is now, but they could see the truth and beauty of an integrated system at work and make sense of it for us. With my personal economist approach, I strive to make economics understandable and applicable to people’s daily lives.
I will never forget reading an archive from the New York Times, which was an obituary of the economist who created the field of macroeconomics. His lucid writing could also be the most cutting weapon. The supreme example of the pen being mightier than the sword. This economist wrote it about a hundred years ago and is still beautiful. It goes like this:
“These were the personalities of Paris--I forbear to mention other nations or lesser men: Clemenceau, aesthetically the noblest; the President, morally the most admirable; Lloyd George, intellectually the subtlest. Out of their disparities and weaknesses, the treaty was born, child of the least worthy attributes of each of its parents, without nobility, without morality, without intellect.”
I hope you enjoy what I write.
