The Western Elite from a Chinese Perspective

> I studied economics at Cambridge, a field which has become more and more mathematical since the 1970s. The goal is always to use a mathematical model to find a closed-form solution to a real-world problem. Looking back, I’m not sure why my professors were so focused on these models. I have since found that the mistake of blindly relying on models is quite widespread in both trading and investing—often with disastrous results, such as the infamous collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. Years later, I discovered the teaching of Warren Buffett: it is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. But our professors taught us to think of the real world as a math problem.

This stuck out to me. In my limited physics education, I was taught to question the models we used and given the tools I needed to experiment and question them. In my limited economics education, I was not taught this, and the models were treated as axiomatic with no mention of how to question these models via experimentation. It felt like the science was stripped out of the field. I wonder if this is a broader trend and, if so, what caused it.

This part resonated with me:

When I was an intern, in one of the training presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish between the process and the results. He said that we should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he said, we don’t punish people for losing money for the right reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the wrong reason? After giving it some thought, he said that he had not heard of any such thing. And he was right. In fact, no one seemed to remember the reason I did the inflation trade at all. They only remembered that I did this trade and that it worked well.