233 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 5 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Lyn Alden book club part I bitcoin
I too am empathetic about the plight of the nascent finance bro.
If you go to a psychology department and pluck a random grad student out of it and say: what is love? you would surely get an answer, but it would not an especially sophisticated answer, given its centrality to human endeavor You could walk away shaking your head, saying: wtf, this is literally a force in human affairs that people will die if they don't have sorted out for the first x years of their life, and if they somehow don't die, they will be hopelessly fucked up for their remaining years. And it's not bc the students are stupid, or unambitious, or incurious -- at least, they need not be. It's because they're there to study one topic in grotesque depth and then somehow get a job later operating in a dying paradigm.
Money isn't exactly the same as love (hopefully) but it doesn't surprise me that some of the same dynamics play out. Or you could say the same for many of us wrt physics, for example. What could be more foundational than the actual building blocks of reality? And yet how many of us could solve the simplest problems in that domain?
In fact, the biggest consequence of all this, to me, is to look around in bafflement and wonder, and a little shame, at how little I know about the key forces in the world.
I was actually thinking that a decent analogy would be to physics and how you might never really learn much about QCD, for instance, depending on your specialty.
The difference wrt to economists and money is that even most monetary economists don't understand money. What they've learned are a bunch of bogus models about central bank policy; most of which are literally useless at describing an economy with more than one type of capital good. To them, money is nothing more than a convenient denominator for relative exchange rates between goods. The past three centuries of monetary theory may as well not even exist.
Edit: I misread your post and thought you had training in physics. My point was that most physicists don't spend much time learning about the subatomic particles that make up almost all matter, despite that obviously being pretty fundamental for everything else.
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