Welcome to my blog. The original idea of creating this was firts proposed to me by my dear friend Paweł Bednarek. The idea is to have this Economics-Machine Learning-Mathematics dedicated blog so you can see what I am up to.

I have decided to write my first blog on the things that I learned during this week. Let me enumerate them:

• Culture-Political Economic History - China.
• Economic learning and Joseph.
• Data Science stuff and its relationship to Continuous time Financial MacroEconomics.

I will summarize each point briefly in case any of it is of interest to you. The professor for whose class ("Foundations of Market Economics") I am TAing ("TA" means teaching assistant) this semester is Jesús Fernández Villaverde. He is currently writing a book about world history from its economic perspective. You can and should check out this blog if you are interested in Economic History. In particular, it is a great source for economic data. In that blog, some authors discuss the role of culture in economic history, for example, in how religion shaped the interactions and private property through families and marriage, e.g., by prohibiting marriage among cousins.

I found it particularly interesting because it relates to the beginning of a book (Rational Herds, Chamley 2002) I started reading on Herding Economics, one area of research I have been looking into for a while now.

How does that relate to Joseph and learning? Well, it turns out that Joseph, the guy of the tunic of many colors from the bible is mentioned by Jordan Peterson, who has a podcast on psychology and discusses many topics. He uses mythology and the bible many times as a departing point to analyze aspects of society and culture. Joseph is sold as a slave by his brothers, and quickly, gaining the favor of the Lord, overcomes his condition of slave by living an honest life, ultimately gaining the favor of pharaoh. The story is long and complex, but the bottom line I want to point out is that there is an aspect of economic life based on responsibility, and to get there, we need to point our lives towards the most noble ideal there is. As Jordan Peterson, it is not that we should not kneel to anything, but rather that we should be cautious of what we are actually kneeling to.

In terms of Continuous Time, I learned (or remembered?) mainly about the mathematical tools required for it, including martingales, measurable function properties, and the famous Radon-Nikodym theorem.

What I thought about on Friday is what we value as society. I wonder if more than guessing the right economic model, we should first consider what set of values we are using to determine our economy. My guesstimate is that whatever moral standpoint you take will lead you to institutions that work accordingly, and from that point the economy would develop. I have not heard of someone postulating such a hypothesis in Economics, so I might write some blogs later on about it.

Thanks for reading!