About Me
Hey there! 
I’m a second year undergraduate economist at the University of Cambridge, thanks to the fully funded Jardine Scholarship. This website is a collection of my thoughts about progress. And I meant that in the broadest sense of the word. I am incredibly grateful to the Mercatus Center for awarding me an Emergent Ventures grant in support of this blog.
If you would like to say hi, feel free to DM me on twitter or shoot me an email. And if you’re involved with high impact things (whether in research, policy or startups) and would like me on board, definitely say hi!
My full (categorised) blog archive is available below, but some of my favourite posts you may want to read include:
- Tim Drake, the Boy Wonder
- Output, Interest and Prices
- Comings and Goings
- A Primer on Economic Growth
If you’re looking for some of my posts from before December 2021, I have removed a bunch of posts which I consider deprecated, so the links may be broken.
My Mood Affiliations
Nyy unvy Ryhn! (rot13)
I first read The Life You Can Save when I was 8/9 years old, and it was the same time that I started listening to Taylor Swift, reading DC comics and browsing through Wikipedia for fun. Almost all of these mood affiliations have stuck around for the decade since.
I care deeply about effective altruism, with a specific interest in accelerating progress and avoiding catastrophes. I want everyone to be a definite optimist again! Outside of that, I’m still a big fan of Taylor Swift and Tim Drake, but to that I’ve added a couple of TV shows I really love: The Newsroom, Person of Interest, The Blacklist, Young Justice and Silicon Valley. Economists I admire include George-Marios Angeletos, Paul Krugman, Bob Lucas, Elinor Ostrom and Thomas Schelling.
Things I’m Thinking About
Currently, I am thinking about the following ideas (among others): How can we use virtual economies to infer things about real economies? What does monetary theory tell us about cryptocurrencies? How can we build institutions that align incentives? How can we model common knowledge in societal interactions? Is it possible to operationalise a large unpaid marketplace for microtasks? What is the underlying mechanism of biological aging? How can we measure or slow aging?
Again, do hit me up if you have thoughts about any of this. And this goes double if you’re based in Hong Kong or Cambridge, in which case I’d love to meet in person (circumstances permitting)!
Blog Archive (in Reverse Chronological Order)
Year 2
- More posts coming up soon!
Year 1
- Tim Drake, the Boy Wonder: Tim Drake is the best Robin.
- Storytelling in Kennywood Park: Monetary policy works in practice, but not in theory.
- Damn Near Everything is Endogenous: Debunking some myths about monetary economics.
- Tis Better to Have Grown and Inflated: Quantifying central bank loss functions.
- Output, Interest and Prices: An 300 year intellectual history of macroeconomics
- The Fallacy of Composition: A summary of intermediate business cycle macroeconomics.
- One Year Later: Every 1% unemployment goes up, 2,000 people die.
- It’s a Love Story: Three economic models of romance.
- Comings and Goings: Unfettered migration is an economic free lunch.
Year 0
- Mr Medlock and the Classics: An economic policy manifesto for social democrats.
- Why Bob Lucas Was Wrong: Business cycle fluctuations matter.
- Stagnation and Separation: Has compensation decoupled from productivity?
- The Hong Kong Hypothesis: Why is Hong Kong’s life expectancy so high?
- A Primer on Economic Growth: A three-part series on economic growth theory.
- Zoning Laws: Problems with zoning laws and how to fix them.
- Bostock for Bisexuals: Is Bostock’s but-for causation bi-exclusionary?
- Eton and Endowments: Optimal endowment policy for Eton College.
- The Global Financial Crisis: Notes on Metrick and Geithner’s Financial Crisis MOOC.