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Political economy — the age of turbulence
I have been part of building software for some financial institutions or companies for most of my professional career, moving money around. One of my first “gigs” was building amortization software for bigger companies owing money to the government called “National Debt.” I can’t say that I knew a lot of finance or economics at the time. I definitely did not know the difference between a stock and a bond.
Since then, I have worked on multiple e-commerce systems with different degrees of moving money around, and building various banking solutions. I learned most about finance from a solution for withholding tax for one of the world’s biggest banks. Most of these are quite more on the technical functions of financial instruments or applying business-specific rules than the more economics-oriented ones of policies that impact the big picture. With that, a personal hobby of mine is economics and its many sub-branches like behavioral economics, which is my current favorite.
Much like any software where we believe the best decisions are taken, there are often forces at hand that drive specific behavior. Simply put, one would believe that every company, as part being a capitalist function, works to maximize its profits. Still, behavioral economics can show that other effects can be at play. Besides behavioral economics, I was curious about reading more about how the levers of economics function since that is more high-level than the application of Bed and Breakfast tax in the UK or finding optimal fraud rules in…
