Economic sound bites

Sometimes it’s just so tempting to bite the hand that feeds. Actually all of the time.

What I have learnt though is that such unexpected behaviour that can be clearly rationalised (and is) usually pays off in the economic world that I live in.

I explain this by a combination of the ‘4 Unit maths’ and the ‘regression to the mean’ hypotheses.

The 4 Unit maths hypothesis was formulated while I was at school. We had a choice of remedial maths, easy 2 Unit maths, harder 3 Unit maths and the universally feared 4 Unit maths. Only a handful of brave souls took the latter. Including me.

All results in all subjects were scaled to a bell curve and then added up to give a score out of 500. I had noticed that the hidden scaling factors favoured the harder subjects and that even a crap score in 4 Unit maths resulted in a good scaled score.

As an aside, this conclusion took quite a bit of research, probably more effort than I put into the subject itself. And ironically this effort required skills consistent with the harder maths Unit.

Basically the lesson in life is, always do the hard things because there is less competition.

The regression to the mean is a simple concept. The longer you do something the more you will regress to a mean. Economically speaking this means that one should always tackle the hard problems with little competition.

Which is why biting the hand that feeds in a rationalised way actually pays off.

And it helps if you don’t give a stuff anyway.