SUMMARY OF WHAT I'M DOING Here's the deal with me: I'm a student at Harvard who's recent switched majors to economics. I've traditionally been a liberal-minded etc. etc. type of guy, and thus found the idea of studying economics rather distasteful. In my mind it was wedded to images of salivating stockbrokers clutching wads of paper and screaming about pork futures, and slick capitalists bulldozing indigenous villages for personal gain, and the general malaise of hideous strip malls full of Arby's, tanning salons, and Fashion Bugs sprawling their way from sea to shining sea. Economics for me equalled the science of ill-begotten windfalls, exploiting poor people, and proliferating a culture of excess... the farther away from it I could get the better.

But then my thinking began to change. More and more often I would read articles about one or another topic (the FTAA, the IMF, sweatshop labor, the Living Wage) and wish that I had some better way to understand them, to critique them, some body of knowledge by which I could come to an informed judgement. I took time off from school and went to work for a small NGO in Mexico that funds street children to go to school. The NGO was doing good work but doing it very inefficiently; how could it be redesigned to operate more efficiently and help more people with its limited resources? I gradually decided that I'd do well to learn a thing or two about economics. I started being tutored by a friend of mine who had majored in economics, then when I came back to school I took courses for myself. With time I saw that economics dealt with all the things I wanted to study--poverty, public health, education, housing, the environment--in ways that made sense to me. It was pragmatic and precise, and (ideally) grounded in hard data. After only a semester back I made the decision to change my major and study economics full bore.

Since childhood I've had a proclivity for math, and the mathematically-based theory side of economics came quite naturally. However, I've always been, to my shame, a bit history-phobic. Major events pass through my mind like water through a sieve. If I was going to be serious about studying economics (and through it, the world) I had to have some knowledge of history.

Enter the nice people at the Harvard College Research Program. I've finagled myself a grant to read economic history in my free time--very nice indeed. As part of the terms of this grant I've agreed to keep a weblog to comment on my reading. This is mostly for my own purposes (to keep me accountable and reading critically) but also as a means of sharing my work with my advisor Jeffrey Williamson and with my friends. (If you're neither my advisor nor a friend of mine I am franklyshocked; but if so read on, you're more than welcome.) So without further ado I'll start blogging.