My name is Victor, and I really like economics. I won’t say love, I won’t say I would give my life for it because that’s way too cliché. But I was good enough to study Economics at one of the most famous universities on the planet on a full scholarship from the government of Malaysia.

I tell you this not to brag, but rather to explain a simple but sad truth to you despite being in that position… I hated it.

Yes, you’ve got that right. The person who is writing this to you at the moment used to hate economics.

It’s not that it’s intellectually boring or forgiving by any means, no. It is very mathematical, especially at the higher levels – But that was part of the problem: I felt that I was getting so into the woods that I was forgetting the trees – but when I later reflected upon it, I came to understand that was because I didn’t understand what I was really looking at or the subject I was studying in the real and intuitive sense that I only came to understand later on, after distilling the insights, the math, the common sense, and now, the realities of economics.

Looking back, I think life would’ve been much easier if somebody had clearly and plainly explained to me what this was all about, how it all connected together, what a grand picture really was. With that in mind, here’s my mission:

Mission

I want to create a resource for you to understand economics no matter what country, no matter what race, no matter what religion you happen to come from. You are all my sepupus, and I want you to understand this subject and hopefully begin to enjoy it as well.

Motivation

1. To teach economics both to an academic and layperson’s audience.

Many people know about economics in bits and pieces, and some people may not see its relevance, preferring to quote “rely” on their real-world experiences as an excuse for not understanding the world. I think that this is such a shame because economic theory has so much to add into your life whether you are young or you are old. I am therefore here to fix that by creating a space where you can learn about it in a pleasant and conversational way and also learn what you need for your studies as well.

2. To address the Training Gap.

Economics requires intuition and the ability to analyze things. It’s not just about definitions and it’s not just about reading numbers in a newspaper, and it’s definitely not just about having a degree in economics.

No, it requires the ability to understand world events and how they affect other world events and how everything connects together in a weird combination of understanding preferences, choices, interactions first-order across all levels of a society based on a mixture of data, theory, and human judgment.

Regrettably, this is the kind of instruction that people are getting almost every day from teachers who have not mastered these fundamentals and cannot connect them to the real world.

This is not a subject that can be thought by simply reading off some slides. At least not in a good way.

3. To address the Learning Experience Gap

Students often come into economics classes and are exposed to a bunch of different theories about how things work in the world. If things happen as they normally would and on average, what they will bring home is theory as memorized from slides before exams. It is after all easy to mechanize or memorize certain things. Price goes up, quantity demanded goes down. Was there a drought? Supply curve shifts left. But I think that this is not really learning in the best possible way and at best it is often just picking up certain algorithms rather than actually thinking.

I don’t want to bore you, and I don’t want to waste your time. I want to create a learning experience for you that will make you genuinely question the world around you across a range of different topics and find excitement in the things that you are looking at.

4. To emphasize the importance of critical thinking in our society through an economic lens.

I said at the outset that economics is not just about definitions, and at that time I talked a little bit about teachers.

Here I want to talk about our entire society.

I hope that through this work I can get more people to see the importance of reasoning with economics, thinking with economics, and making use of the realizations of economics and understanding of resource constraints in order to understand the events that happen in our country (whatever country you happen to be from), our society, and our world. In order to help develop a world and a population of people more well equipped to understand the unique challenges of our generation and able whether we are all replaced by robots or not this aspect of critical thinking is crucially important and something that I encourage you to develop either independently or I hope as a result of your presence on this site.

Thank you for being a part of this journey sepupus, and I look forward to helping you to grow and develop!

Victor Tan,

Founder,
Sepupunomics.com.