Learning by Doing

"Ok, I've been gone for a minute, but now I'm back with the jump off" (Lil Kim)
I'm not really jumping off anything, but I'm ready to write again. I feel like I have 5 extra minutes today to devote to writing non-academic prose. So, here goes...

Boxed macaroni and cheese has never tasted as good as it did today. After maybe 3 or 4 years of no Kraft macaroni and cheese, it has found its way back into my kitchen. Oh lordy, words cannot describe the immense pleasure I felt while eating that orange meal from a cardboard box! It was expensive but definitely worth the money. In fact, I just may wait another 3 years to eat it again. I don't want it to become everyday food again. Having it as a luxury meal makes it taste way better :).


On the same topic of food, I recently made my first pot of cornmeal porridge. Not even cancer patients have so many lumps. There was a lump fiesta going on in my porridge :). Anyhow, the second time I tried, it came out lump free. Ah dear, I guess my incompetence to prepare this everyday meal is a result of not having any grandparents. I've heard that grandmothers teach grandchildren how to cook among other important life lessons. Anyways, learning by doing is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there's an economic theory by that exact name, 'learning by doing'. You would think that that would be obvious to everyone, right. It's very effective to learn something by doing it. So why did they need to create a theory to show just that? Sometimes I think some Economists have nothing to do. But on a serious note, that's exactly what Economists do - observe life and the elements that participate in the economy and create theories and models that describe them. I guess it's a way of documenting our existence. The theories and models are then tested to see how they actually measure up to reality.

That, in a small nutshell, is economics. Please don't confuse it with business. Financial economists are the closest peers with Business men. Financial economists may watch the financial market and theorize and make models or follow models then business men will take the information and do business. In general though, one should not expect an economist to be financially savvy with overflowing expertise about business and money. I think that would be like asking a gynaecologist about the steps to build an x-ray machine. They both exist in similar fields, but medicine and medical technology are very different.

Taken from a Slideshare presentation by Ranganadh Siitam