Freshernomics

Artwork by Christelle Troost

Hannah Buttle comically breaks down economic theories for the average fresher.

Economics is not just about finance, markets, and sounding vaguely intelligent when your mate’s parents ask you what you do. It gives you a set of tools that help make sense of the world around you. Like anything in 2019, economics is best consumed when re-branded as some form of self-help. Here are some economic ideas that can help you hack your first year.

Incentives

What motivated you to read this article? Was it procrastination, genuine interest, or are you, in fact, my mother, and therefore duty bound to read everything I write until one of us dies? When economists talk about incentives, we are asking ‘how can we get people to do the things we want them to do?’. Incentives can encourage companies to innovate, parents to vaccinate their children, you to click on another Pi article while your essay languishes next to you.

Incentives are why your flatmate has been ‘too hungover’ to clean up after themselves in the kitchen for three weeks. You don’t have to sit there glowering at a stack of unwashed plates. You can change your flatmates’ incentives so that it becomes easier to wash up than to not wash up.

For example, put their dirty plates outside their door, like a reverse room service. Then they will remember that they are no longer at boarding school and the plates will not magically vanish.

Failing that, put all the plates in a bin bag and post a series of incensed WhatsApp messages to the group chat explaining that this was the only way they’d ever make it out of the sink. Two years later, write a poorly concealed article about these events for a student newspaper.

Optimal Stopping Theory

How many people do you have to date before you meet your soulmate?

Using a formula that I like to call ‘the reason no one wants to shag anyone with a STEM degree’, mathematicians have calculated that the best way to find the perfect partner is to work out how many dates you might have in your lifetime, reject the first 37% of dates you go on, and then immediately marry the first person who comes along who is better than everyone you met before. Don’t believe me? Get ready to die alone.

It might not sound romantic, but at least you know there’s an upper limit to the number of tubs of ice cream, gilets, and venereal diseases that you have to encounter in your dating life.

And what a beautiful wedding speech you could make ‘I knew she was the one when she walked through the door, because she was number 38. My darling, mathematically, you are perfect for me, because you’re just not quite as bad as everyone else I’ve met’. Lovely.

Signaling

Most of the people you’ll meet in your first year will know nothing about you. In the absence of full information, they will look for ‘signals’ to decide if you’re the right fit for them as a friend. Potential pals will make up their mind about you based on what you wear, your music taste, and whether there’s a Pulp Fiction poster on your wall.

Decide now: TigerTiger or Heaven? Psychedelics Society or EFS? To beret or not to beret? If you want to maximize your friend making opportunities, be a majestic peacock of alluring signals.

But beware of trying for a complete personality overhaul. If you start wearing a bucket hat and smoking roll ups, all the friends you make will also be wearing bucket hats and smoking roll ups, and then where will you be? Pretending to enjoy Hugo’s spoken word poetry performance, probably.

Still here? If you’ve made it to the end of the article, I hope you’re convinced that economics is for everyone, not just the guy who wears a suit to a 9am lecture and is adamant that the pay gap is just a myth. 

Most adults in the UK, particularly women, rate their understanding of economics as fairly poor. My hope is that, if you are one of these adults, this article encourages you to change that. When public understanding of the economy is low, poverty reduction policies can be sacrificed at the altar of ‘The Economy’, even when their economic credentials are shaky. The more that non-economists are empowered to learn more about the field, the harder it will be to sneak these policies through.

If nothing else, I spent my first year in a mouldy basement next door to a Trump supporter who would spend his evenings in our kitchen reading aloud from Breitbart like a reverend with a Bible. In my first week, a toasted pitta bread gone wrong led to me almost setting my kitchen on fire. But I survived, and so will you.