A sideways look at economics
At its core, the subject of economics is about how best to use scarce resources. So, when I discovered my name on the roster to write the company blog Thank Fathom It’s Friday (TFIF) earlier this week, I immediately knew that I needed to practise what I preach, and find the time to write a decent TFIF, even though I knew that I had very little time to do so. In the end the solution was obvious: write a TFIF about how to write TFIF.
Option 1: use ChatGPT.
Not cool. Nobody wants to read an AI-generated blogpost about economics, trying to be funny.
Option 2: TFIF ends here.
Tempting – not least because less is sometimes more and readers’ time is precious. We both have an incentive for me to cut this short.
Option 3: do something you were going to do anyway.
Whatever I ended up writing about this week, the one thing I knew I would have to do was think about what I should write about. What if that could be my topic? Knowing that I needed do this no matter what and knowing that TFIFs are meant to be quirky and a sideways look at economics I sensed an opportunity. The economic hook? Me demonstrating my application of economic principles, by writing about my demonstration of these principles. At least it should be a lot less time-consuming than calculating the probability of being eaten by a shark, as I did last time, or keeping a record, over months, to see if my colleagues were making their fair share of drinks.
Being productive is using scarce resources in the best way possible. For economists, this is fundamental to most of what we do. Productive countries are ones where workers produce more per hour worked. Productive firms are ones that sell more, while keeping costs down. Productive workers are ones that produce more than others. Productive economists are ones who can get their ideas across in a clear way. Productive blog writers get their TFIFs done nice and quickly so they can go back to doing economic analysis, working on that consultancy project, pushing that sale, checking the latest rugby news, etc. Life isn’t always about productivity, but sometimes being productive is essential.
The nature of what most economists do, and a lot of what Fathom Consulting does, is to get ideas across to clients to help them make better decisions. This could be through a consultancy project, after months of considered analysis, literature reviews and bespoke model-building, like we did on the topic of decarbonising European aviation. It could be researching ideas like the effect of tariffs on inflation and trade, as we did for our latest quarterly forecast, Global Outlook, Winter 2025. The good thing about our work as consultants and researchers is that we are building our knowledge base all the time. Sometimes we share these with clients after putting in hundreds of hours of bespoke work, but sometimes our value can be sharing knowledge that was already in our heads, data we already had. It can be problem-solving, or even our personalities.
Have I proved my point? Is this sufficient?
I leave you with one last reflection. My revelation when thinking about this is that, for economists and some other service providers, our brains are the key part of the product we sell. In fact, our brains are the product. This can be very different to other industries where tangible things need to be built, such as constructing a house or assembling something in a factory. It’s even different from providing other types of service, such as cutting hair, unblocking a drain or performing as a professional athlete. Using your brain as your stock-in-trade has its pros and cons and perhaps explains why some economists are big-headed. My point is, given the nature of the service we provide, it is crucial that we organise ourselves so that we can get our ideas out of our brains and into the brains of our clients in the most efficient way possible. Hopefully this post gives clients or prospective clients a flavour how we do this.
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It’s the journey, not the destination