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Economy

Blog Economics Economy Reflections

Education and Economics: The Linkage and the Grand Design.

Victor Tan
 

Hello Sepupus one and all! 

Fun little blog post today. I’ve been meaning to talk about this for a while but a lot of syllabus planning and a whole range of other things got in the way.

But here we discuss for you right now the relationship between education and economics.

Whether you realize it or not, these two are linked with one another in an inextricable fashion, and it doesn’t matter that you don’t take economics at all because it remains true.

In this blog post, I hope to show you the outlines of the picture and help you understand how everything connects together in what some might say is a grand design, but what others might very easily and rightfully say is just “how the world works”.

Ready? Let’s go!

Now it’s no secret that in this blog you’re going to find a whole range of maximum value packed resources for education. Specifically you’ve got a range of different resources for IB, IGCSE, A-levels and everything out there.

Some of you out there who are of the opinion that education shouldn’t be linked to a particular syllabus, shouldn’t be linked to curricula, want to abandon your college degrees right now and go out and become heroes of the new liberal universe. Well you might want to read this and read it closely. 

When we talk about education, it is easy to just think of it as a process of making people learn, and indeed, that’s very much what it is.

Education is for training. 

In search of that training, students enter classrooms by the dozens, the hundreds, the thousands, and the millions, depending on whether you’re talking about the scale of a single classroom, a school, a country, or in turn, the world, to get training on language, mathematics, the sciences, history, and any number of other things in the service of an educational program, whether that of a nation aiming to shape its identity and build up a competent generation able to compete in the world or a private initiative that aims for the same, getting that parents will seek the very best possible outcomes with the resources that they invest into as they test out their philosophy of what is correct, proper, and necessary for the whole advancement of a child. 

Isn’t it wonderful that people are so dedicated to self-improvement? 

That they would all automatically and out of the goodness of their own hearts direct their kids to go through academic torture all in the name of gaining wonderful skills in the modern world for their self-empowerment? 

Well, you might think that, but in most parts of modern society—no matter what country you live in nowadays—If you have children below the age of 18, and you don’t send them to school and have no valid reason, you will be fined, you may be arrested, and child and social services may arrest you — this is because 

Education is not just training; it is also legally required.

In other words? The state takes an interest in whether you train your child or not; negligence of your child’s education is in fact against the law. 

Is it just a matter of the law though?

Well, as it turns out, no. That’s just one part of it. Because if parents were just coerced to bring their kids into schools against their will, you could imagine there being an entire generation of people just malingering, doing the bare minimum in order to help their kids not become prison liabilities for them.

The reality, however, is infinitely more complex and interesting than that. 

Rather than just doing the bare minimum, parents engage in incredibly complex stances to ensure that their children not only enter the education system but thrive within it by an act of willing volition.

But before you come up with your fanciful speculations about what is and what is not, no, it is not by pure altruism that this happens and it is not on account of a mere game.

Education not only trains, but it also certifies.

This one has a college degree – good! He has certain basic skills! Wow! This one graduated from a top university. Amazing! He must be really smart! Wow, this one reads Sepupunomics and also took IG, A-levels and IB economics. He must surely know a lot about economics!

What’s the corollary of that? 

Education not only certifies but it facilitates selection. 

It is probably easiest to show you what I mean with an example. 

Wow! We have so many qualified scholarship applicants, but only one scholarship to give. Hey! She got 10 A*s for her IGCSEs and we have one scholarship and everyone got 9A*s and one A and only 20 minutes to decide before clock out at 5pm. Let’s pick her!

Hey! We need some really smart people to work on our very sensitive project and we only have one hour to get through all the resumes before saving the world from Thanos! What do we do? 

Oh, the University of Chicago is renowned for smart people – hire him! (Sorry had to glaze my alma mater there LOL) 

And what’s the corollary of all that? 

Beyond teaching you about choice, giving you inspiration, cultivating the way that you think, make decisions, articulate yourself, and develop skills and develop skills that are important not only for functioning in the adult world but also in day-to-day life, education also shapes how other people make choices about you — Not only by certifying you but also providing mechanisms for training and assessing you across all relevant dimensions, which is what educational programs like the IGCSE A-levels, IB, and the whole smorgasbord of different economics courses you may encounter later in university may present to you, to not even speak about the ways that people can make inferences about whether you are educated or you are not from the way that you speak, the way that you articulate yourself, the topics that you raise, and the ideas that you communicate with the world. 

On these dual levels then, and in respect to the scarcity that we all share in both of time and money and a whole range of other resources that none of us have an infinite amount of. 

Education is inextricably linked with the economics that you are studying — Either formally if you’re taking one of the educational programs I mentioned earlier or otherwise or informally if you are just reading this and nodding along. 

Isn’t it lovely and meta to think about how by studying economics you learn about choice, and right now in reading this blog post you’re learning about how you are learning about choice? 

It’s almost like that John Green novel about turtles all the way down, except now this is economics and we are talking about choices all the way down and how they all take part in a common framework that can’t be separated from society and the real world as it stands. 

Whether it’s for training and you can’t get out of it because of the law, you’re seeking certification or in turn trying to be selected. It’s clear that education interfaces with economics in all too many critical ways. 

We would not pay the doctor who has no medical degree, nor would we hire someone who doesn’t have the right skills. It doesn’t make sense on both of those counts, and in both counts, the ostensible problem is a lack of education, whether in providing the certification that the doctor can actually perform the operation or in the vibe check that affirms that the person who’s trying to get a job from you is actually someone worth while speaking to or listening to. 

When we move beyond that abstraction, it becomes easier to understand. 

If you pay this doctor and not an educated doctor, you lose your money — Not only might it be the case that your disease won’t be cured, but if he prescribes you the wrong medicine or does the wrong kind of treatment, you could become even more ill and in the worst case die. If you hire someone who doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the learning a bit of someone who needs to master a very difficult field in a very short amount of time, the money that you pay out every single month to put them in the job that you might put them in would actively be a drain on company expenses with no measurable benefit. 

Look through and understand our economy and the way that we provide and receive services, instruction, training, and guidance in all of its forms, and there you will see — In every industry and in every way, the dynamics of scarcity, choice, education, and decision come into play in a symphony that even if you cannot directly tease apart, you engage in playing a role, even if you are not conscious of it.

Alright, and that’s all for today. I’ll see you guys in the next one! 

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Assessment Economics Economy International Baccalaureate Syllabus

🎯 Nailing the IB Economics IA: Your Ultimate Survival & Success Guide

Victor Tan
 

Be careful what you wish for, because you may actually get it.

This is one of the things that I constantly say to people who are contemplating the IB and who want to do so because it provides a ‘balanced’ education.

Well yes, it’s ‘balanced’, but do you know what that entails?

Today, let’s explore a little bit of that!

One of the things that almost every IB student yearns for but later regrets is the Internal Assessment.

🧠 What is the IB Economics IA?

The IA is a series of three commentaries, each based on a real-world news article. You’ll write one for each of the main branches of economics:

  1. Microeconomics
  2. Macroeconomics
  3. The Global Economy (trade or development)

Each commentary is capped at 800 words, and you’re expected to:

  • Use a news article no more than one year old.
  • Analyze the article using relevant economic theory.
  • Include at least one diagram.
  • Apply your own evaluation (not just description).

It’s internally marked by your teacher and externally moderated by IB, and it counts for 20% of your final grade.

Internal Assessments are, as the wording suggests, internal (they are within your school) and they are assessed (these are not just homework); they contribute 20% of your overall IB grade.

Let’s also observe that this process will take place about one year into the course after you’ve learned a good bit of course material and will also take place alongside the IA process for every single one of your other five subjects while you are trying to desperately complete your CAS (if you hadn’t already) and also your Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge essay as you revise your one designated draft with your teacher in the knowledge that how well you do will determine your entire grade.

But here’s the truth: the Economics IA doesn’t have to be a nightmare. In fact, it can be one of the most rewarding parts of the course—if you know how to approach it.

Let’s break down everything you need to know. Consider this your friendly survival guide from someone who’s been through the trenches and lived to tell the tale.

🔎 Step 1: Finding the Right Article—The Scavenger Hunt

This is where your IA journey really begins. At first, you may feel like a detective trying to find a clue in a haystack of economic headlines. But trust me—this part is crucial.

Here’s what you want:
✅ The article is recent (published within the last year).
✅ It focuses on a policy (like a tax, subsidy, interest rate change, or trade tariff).
✅ It’s not too technical or long—you want to explain it, not quote it.
✅ There’s room for analysis, application, and evaluation.

The reason that this is crucial is that when you write your commentary, you want to have something that you can effectively comment about, it has to be intellectually interesting and worth talking about, and it has to be a recent matter.

🧠 Pro tip: Use Google News with search terms like “government imposes tax,” “central bank raises interest rate,” or “import tariff Malaysia.” Once you find a good one, screenshot and save it—you don’t want to lose your gold nugget.

🏗️ Step 2: Building the Commentary—Your 800-Word Masterpiece

Think of your commentary like a mini-essay. Here’s a reliable structure to follow:

  1. Introduction: Briefly summarize the article and define the economic concept(s).
  2. Theory and Diagram: Explain the relevant theory. Draw and label your diagram.
  3. Application: Show how the theory applies to the article.
  4. Evaluation: Weigh the pros and cons. Consider stakeholders. Suggest alternatives. Include short-run vs. long-run effects. CLASPP is a nice guide and acronym (Conclusion, Long term/Short term, Applications, Stakeholders, Priorities, Pros/Cons), but it’s not a good substitute for critical thinking and for understanding how things relate to one another in both broad and narrow aspects; it is very easy to repeat the acronym over and over again; if you are not getting inspiration, take a step back. More on this soon.)

Don’t waste words. Be concise, clear, and logical.

🧠 Pro tip: Your diagram is your best friend. A well-labeled diagram can communicate what 200 words can’t—and yes, it must be fully explained in the text.

👩‍🏫 Working with Your Teacher—Your IA Wingperson

Your economics teacher isn’t just marking your IA—they’re mentoring you through it.

In most schools, your teacher will:

  • Approve your article
  • Give feedback on your first draft (IB allows only one round of formal feedback)
  • Help clarify the concepts and guide your structure

Let me also say this:

Teachers have a huge role in this process and you want your teacher to be on your side, because that makes all the difference – also, the quality of the teacher and how well they’re organized/how they are able to allocate time is very crucial; it’s clear that the commentary and the feedback process requires individualized attention – imagine what that must be like to deal with if you’re dealing with a class of 30 economics students where each student has one commentary and one round of feedback, which means that there will be 90 separate pieces of feedback that that single teacher has to produce for their students after having read each individual commentary, understood each commentary, and provided guidance on what specifically to improve; imagine that these 30 students each ask for feedback meetings for one hour for their commentaries – that’s 180 hours total on student meetings alone, not even including preparation time for those feedback meetings and the cooldown time after.

Clearly, it is very labor intensive and it’s also one reason why it’s justifiable for IB to be so expensive.

Use your privilege of feedback wisely. Don’t show up with a half-baked idea and hope for a miracle. Instead, prepare your thoughts, show initiative, and be open to rewriting (because you will rewrite)

Make your teacher’s life simple and reason through everything properly – don’t come in with half-hearted preparation, but rather with the attitude that your first draft will be your final draft, and do the very best that you can.

✍️ Writing Tips to Make Your IA Shine

  • Define your terms. IB loves clear definitions, and your sepupu does as well. Make sure that people have a clear idea of what you mean when you speak, and ensure that that’s the case by clearly articulating your definitions before you use them.
  • Avoid narration. Don’t just retell the article. Analyze it. Understand what’s happening. In other words, make it so that when I read what you write, I understand what is happening from an economics perspective.
  • Stick to the word limit. 800 words means 800 economically powerful words.
  • Keep it focused. Don’t try to cover everything. Go deep, not wide.
  • Use real-world language. But keep your tone academic.

I may include exemplars from my own students soon.

🧠 Pro tip: Write with the IB rubric in mind. You are scored on diagrams, application, analysis, evaluation, and language. So always ask: “Which criterion am I hitting with this sentence?”

⏳ The Emotional Rollercoaster

Let’s not sugarcoat it: the IA process will test your time management, your research skills, and occasionally your sanity. You’ll write something, feel proud of it, then realize you misunderstood the policy. Or you’ll find the perfect article a week after you’ve written the draft.

That’s normal. Everyone goes through this.

The best students are not the ones who get it perfect the first time. They’re the ones who revise, reflect, and stay calm.

🏁 Final Thoughts: Your IA Is a Mirror

Here’s the real magic of the IA: it reflects how well you understand economics and how well you can apply it in the real world. It’s not about memorization—it’s about thinking like an economist.

But more importantly, it’s about applying your ideas to the real world.

I think that that is really fascinating, because theory is not really a satisfying thing at the end of the day, and it is useless if it doesn’t help people to explain reality – in a way, we could therefore say that being able to write an IA intelligently and to comment on the world around you is the entire meaning of economics; it is how you test yourself against that reality and demonstrate that you are able to communicate with other human beings.

So embrace the process. Be patient with yourself. And when you finally hand in your IA and realize, “Hey—I just used economic theory to explain real-world issues,” you’ll feel that flicker of pride; you’ll feel that flicker of pride even more strongly when you realize that what you wrote can actually cause a person who is reading it to understand the issue more deeply and understand how it relates to resource allocation and how it’s likely to benefit or to harm society.

Isn’t it nice to be able

Go forth, young economist. The world is waiting to be analyzed and evaluated, and a 45 out of 45 awaits you.
And who knows? That little commentary might just be the first step toward a lifelong fascination with how the world works!

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Blog Current Affairs Discrimination Economics Economy Reflections Social media Society

The Sepupunomics of Racial Discrimination – Part 2: Is it REALLY Discrimination?

Victor Tan
 

By now, you’ve probably already read The Sepupunomics of Racial Discrimination, Part 1. If you haven’t, pop back over and come back in a while!

Anyway, this is a topic that is extremely interesting and one that I mentioned is deeply relevant to economics.

Let me remind you of the definition I used in the last post.

Discrimination is the differential treatment of individuals or groups based on perceived group membership rather than individual merit.

I also mentioned that discrimination shapes how resources are allocated in our society by others, and it also shapes our view of ourselves and what seems logical for us to do when we ourselves allocate resources, whether we invest our time into an endeavor, our money into a business, or our presence within a country – But let me not speak in rhymes, riddles, or theory at the moment.

If you are from Malaysia, as with pretty much all other geographies, I am sure that many of you have thought that you have been discriminated against in your life.

I mean that completely, by the way.

It’s not just that Black Lives Matter exists as a real reaction to racial discrimination or the George Floyd “I can’t breathe” moment – I think that it is true even for white people nowadays in a sense, beyond the ironic, even as people share “It’s okay to be white”.

For that matter, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Malay, Chinese, or Indian either – If you go around reading social media, you will see every single major racial group declaring that they have been discriminated against, indicating a fundamental truth:

There are people from every single racial group on the planet who feel that they are getting discriminated against.

From personal experience, I can speak about Chinese family dinner table experiences where elderly people tell you about how projects are given to people who are not of your race, scholarships were given to a random acquaintance’s child because they were Malay, and that your goal, your sole and only goal, is to run away from this country as fast as possible because it is not for you and you will never be valued.

If you are Indian, we could also speak about the tales that we hear about people not renting because you had the wrong skin color, or because you were denied the same scholarships as the people in the Chinese family situation — now with a double dose of insults about illegal temples and people questioning you about your stance on Pakistan because apparently you must support Pakistan otherwise you’re not Malaysian.

Oh, but are all the aggressors Malays?

I read too much and too widely across different media ecosystems to conclude that that’s how the Malays feel — just look on social media to see dozens of different people talking about how apparently 3R laws are only for Malay people or any number of delightful permutations of ideas that people have about how somehow an imaginary system is against them, justifying Malay umbrellas, ‘agama dan bangsa’ yapping, and inviting reactions from a whole universe for whom there is nothing optimal about this situation in first, second, third, or fourth order for any community in this country.

Of course, these people are a small sample of a wider pool, but it’s not like they don’t exist or their views aren’t valid.

Do I assume some of these people are lying?

How about all of them, even as I consider an unspecified proportion of them to merely play victim in their own little racial boxes?

…Or shall I just be a charitable person and think that actually none of them are lying at all, and in reality, they are unfortunate people in a broken world?

Well… The reality is slightly more nuanced than that.

Imagine, for example, that the reason you are complaining about this in the first place is because you lost a scholarship and now your family has to go into debt in order to pay your way through university. There then arises a big question. Did you lose the scholarship because you were discriminated against? Or was it because you were just not good enough, however that’s defined?

Consider just some of the following follow-ups.

How can we know it’s discrimination?

Were you actually discriminated against, or was it just perception?

You might think it’s easy to differentiate, but it’s actually not.

I can cite you hundreds of kids who got 8 A’s for their SPM exams and who tried to apply for scholarships and didn’t get the scholarship, and then went out immediately raising hell and declaring that surely they were discriminated against because their results were so amazing, yet they didn’t receive funding, declaring “It was because I was Chinese!” or “It was because I was Indian!” or even “The government is racist against Malays and it gave all the scholarships to those Chinese and Indians!”

“How do you know how they made the decision, or who applied?”, you might ask — but then faced with that, the same people might very well then cite one or two examples of people who had less good results but who managed to get certain scholarships or grants for their education that the complainer did not as they raise hell in a state of aggrievement that unfortunately, I don’t really have a lot of sympathy for.

Yes it’s true that it could be sad if you’re not from a rich family and you don’t get a scholarship and thus cannot continue your education… But to what extent is it really fair to say that you didn’t get a scholarship because of your race and not because you didn’t display enough merit?

I am sure that many people don’t even get to the point of asking this question.

It’s undoubtedly true that many people have faced some kinds of racial slurs or epithets in their lives or the realities of living in a society where race and religion are very real things that affect how we experience life in this country, but it’s unclear that this means that scholarship providers or the people who were responsible for administering any treatment, allocating financial resources, or otherwise made the decisions that they did did so because they viewed you as being Chinese, Indian, Malay, or otherwise.

It is far from trivial to declare yourself a victim of discrimination.

In fact, whether you get rejected or not, race may not have been relevant in the first place, and the reason that you might have not gotten a scholarship need not actually have anything to do with race but instead could have something to do with your income level, the quality of your interview performance, or your academic performance – there could also have been luck, chance, or circumstance along the way.

Clearly, it is quite hard to determine what exactly happened here, and not just if you didn’t get the scholarship. In fact, even if you did get a scholarship, could you definitively prove why it is that it was you who got the scholarship? If you said no, then I think you are probably on the right track — I will never know why I, a Chinese, was given a full scholarship equivalent to more than 20 years of an average Malaysian’s annual income, to complete my education overseas — but I would probably not conclude that it was because of discrimination either positive or negative.

What if we move beyond this very limited context into understanding some of the more broad-ranging questions that we might have out there about discrimination in universities, workplaces, or otherwise in domains that extend beyond our personal lives?

Well, clearly the complexity increases.

  • Did students not get admitted to a particular university because they were of the wrong race?
  • Was it because of their academic performance?
  • Was it because of a particular affirmative action policy or was it because of the lack of an affirmative action policy?
  • Did they even apply in the first place and if they did, did they apply seriously?
  • Were there other factors that were not considered?

Whatever your answers to the questions above, and in the context of any and all of the answers whether provisional or settled that you gave to those questions earlier, can you prove your assertions beyond a shadow of doubt?

If you have no answers, then good – you’re in the right place.

Let me draw this to a close by first telling you what I am NOT saying.

I am not saying that discrimination does not exist in our society; it can be very real and present.

You can feel it subjectively with all the force of a thousand hurricanes, and however it is that you choose to go through life as you view the world through your lens of perception, that lens is yours and yours alone to decide what to do with the whole to refine and to look through and to behold the universe and its truths, lies, half-truths and half-lies, as it filters itself out to you in the limited span of your perception and really, if you feel that way, are you really wrong…?

But all I am saying is, before you conclude that something is discrimination, you may want to take a step back and ask yourself, “Is it discrimination? Am I sure that that’s the case? Can I prove it?”

Perhaps there, beyond the informational asymmetry that you may try to but never completely resolve, you will find yourself going into statistics – the statistical discrimination of Phelps and Arrow (basically, making decisions about individuals on the basis of what you observe about the average behaviors or qualities of groups), understanding how groups may be treated differently across time and space, and learning to think about both the discriminations that exist in the world and how to excel in that world anyways, damn any discrimination that may come along the way – Even if discrimination should exist, you may well then be thinking, “I will be the one to overcome”.

…Or will you choose not to engage in the process in the first place because stereotypes shape or confirm your beliefs?

Sure, the lens is modulated by attention, shaped by the evidence of our senses, beliefs, value systems, and history of prior interactions with the world, but it seems to me that while discrimination is a possibility, assuming that you are discriminated against at first glance against all evidence and at smallest moment of notice is a slippery slope towards a different kind of evil: playing victim, which, as a phenomenon, has its own fair share of maladies.

So yes, is it really discrimination?

I can’t answer that question for you in your unique situation, but if there was something that this blog post was meant to accomplish, hopefully it was to make you look around you and look at the world and begin to ask the question.

Alright, and that’s all I have to say about that, and I’ll see you in the next one!

Yours,

Sepupu.

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