Ask HN: How did you learn economics? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you learn economics?

2 pointssandwichbop3 comments

I believe that understanding economics is pretty essential in tech. I see a lot of career struggles where it helps understanding fundamentals with depth, to foresee how trends are working past present future and how you can stay a step ahead. I did a degree in econ and CS, and during my undergrad I remember trying to get my CS friends to gawk at FRED data or BLS reports with me, but they never were really interested, especially when in their opinion, there were more pressing matters to attend to like gaming. So, I wonder, how did you learn about economics? Was it out of necessity or curiosity? Did you learn via book recommendations or some youtube channel? What pushed you to really learn about economics beyond what the average techie would know?

> I believe that understanding economics is pretty essential in tech. I see a lot of career struggles where it helps understanding fundamentals with depth, to foresee how trends are working past present future and how you can stay a step ahead.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure I completely agree.

Most of my friends who made huge amounts of money by joining the right company (Nvidia, Facebook) did so out of sheer luck and didn't anticipate the stock gains in any way (otherwise they would've diversified a lot less and just kept the equity grants they received rather than selling for index funds).

Anyway, picking the right company to join seems more like "stock-picking" than it does economics. Not sure how reading BLS reports would help you with that.

>so out of sheer luck

this sounds more like survivorship bias no? You can keep playing lucky if you want, but that's more on being lucky. I like to keep risk low and so the objective is reducing the need to be "lucky", to get more consistent results without luck and this is where having those economic fundamentals work. Economics is more than stock-picking, that's more of a finance thing imo.

So how is it relevant to a career in tech?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com