Hacker News Reader

How so? The Markov chain reference is only used in a reformulation of the same statement already said in layman terms.

Markov Chain is a pretty elementary concept. Anyone interested in having a serious discussion of economics should at least have a passing familiarity with it.

Good to know. I'm only familiar with it in a computing context.

CS degree? I was completely sure Markov chains were high school material

Looks like ~1% of US high school students had stats in 1990 and only ~11% in 2009. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=97

I'd be shocked if more than 5% (and even that's a stretch) of fresh high school graduates in the US knew what a Markov chain is.

So? General population is an abysmally low benchmark in any country. People from 5% of top high schools sounds about right for an article like this.

Anecdotally, they were at my high school in the US.