Peter's academic interests

A favourite academic area formally studied

Euler's identity
Could anything be neater?

Although it was not my major at university, I've loved mathematics since I was in high school. It was a surprise to discover this. When I was in primary school, I hadn't really thought about mathematics, and the nuns who taught me at the Catholic convent school I went to were not very good at mathematics. But from the first class in high school, I discovered that it is was easy for me. Better, I loved the certainty. When I proved something in mathematics, it was proved 100%, and that gave me a great sense of satisfaction. After school, I used to do math problems for the fun of seeing them work out. I always remember my amazement in year 11 of high school when I could prove Euler's identity for myself. It still amazes me today that that set of very different foundational numbers so neatly combine in one short, simple equation, although the mathematics behind that apparent simplicity is a bit more complex, so to speak (math joke). The equation is the image on the left. 

Yes, I was a bit geeky in school, also at university, where I continued studying pure mathematics alongside my major in philosophy. 

I think the things that attracted me to mathematics, apart from being very good at it, are also reflected in other areas of my life. I like things to be clear, certain and settled. Unfortunately, most of life is not so neat as mathematics. Those messy things, like relationships, often cause me grief because they are much more difficult to understand, and are often insoluble for me, or at least not so neatly solvable as problems in mathematics. 

____________________________________ 

A favourite academic area not formally studied

As I was brushing my teeth this morning, I was thinking about why economics has been a favourite subject for some decades. I've never studied economics, and for a long time, I think I had the wrong idea about it, but when I actually read some economics, I realized how fascinating it is. I can't remember I began reading economics, but it was probably while I was studying the political implications of different moral theories for philosophy courses at university. Looking at how capitalism and communism decide how goods are produced and supplied showed me that economics matters: it affects every aspect of our lives whether we know it or not, and whether we are living in an ancient hunter-gatherer economic system or a modern capitalist state in the liberal democracy of Australia, which is what I grew up in. 

A fun read

The connection that popped into my brain as I was brushing my teeth was when I remembered something Kitt had said in his quick introduction last night: "I love democracy." I also love democracy, and part of the reason for that is that a foundation of democracy is free speech, which is in turn a condition for discovering the truth about things. And economics is a powerful tool for correcting false beliefs. A concrete example might help here. A few years ago I read an essay (actually a whole series of brilliant essays) by behavioural economist Dan Ariely, who applies the methods of economics to how we make decisions not only about producing, buying and trading goods and services, but to other decisions we make, such as those that contribute to things like corruption, which has serious economic consequences for many countries, including Thailand. Based on research he and his teams had done, one of his essays showed me how seriously wrong some of my beliefs had been. I had always thought that dishonest behaviour was a characteristic of only some people, but Ariely demonstrates convincingly that all of us, certainly at elite universities like Harvard, where he did some of the basic research, are easily tempted to dishonest behaviour, but mostly only a little bit dishonest. If you want to reduce corruption, understanding things like this, and the underlying explanations, is important. A different example was about 15 years ago when I read a famous research paper by economist Steven Levitt in which he used his economic analysis tools to investigate why crime had dropped dramatically in the United States in the 1990s: the most surprising part of his answer, one that shocked many people, was that it was the legalization of abortion in the United States in 1973 that had led some 20 years later to the sudden drop in crime. Levitt attributed 40% of that drop to the US Supreme Court decision that gave every American woman control of her own body. 

It is because economics often forces me to correct assumptions I had sincerely believed about how human beings work in the world that I like reading it. I don't like being wrong, but it's better to have a false belief corrected than to continue with it. (But not technical financial economics - that is important, but does not excite me). And as I realized while standing in front of my mirror brushing my teeth, the correction of false beliefs, including my own, makes enjoying economics consistent with a love of democracy. 

Sadly, the insights of economics are still not so pure and certain as the proofs of mathematics, but it tells great stories about we humans.