u/amusedobserver5

One thing I often think about is how easy it is to get Economics concepts wrong if you don’t have a degree. But I also don’t know how those concepts are understood without rigor?

In high school I got into “Economics” but mostly the libertarian and Austrian version proliferating those spaces. I thought that the economy was too complex to be understood mathematically and things should be left alone to a neoclassical steady state. In my Econ/Math degree I realized how fundamentally wrong I was about everything.

All this to say how do we bridge the gap and are there successful interventions besides actually learning the discipline?

At the beginning of my career I wanted to build complex charts. I felt insecure about those pretty Tableau visualizations that get put on Public. But I came to realize that almost everything important needs to be a line chart. It doesn’t matter how cool your analysis is or what neat visual you’re using. It needs to be a line chart. Or a chart where when you look at it simulates a line chart (bars over time). Bonus points if the line goes up or down.

I literally made a presentation that circulated around the lower tier C Suite and the primary graphs were versions of line charts or bar charts where you could trace a category over time. Quote “this is amazing data” “our team did that? That’s really great stuff”

I know it’s a meme but I just can’t tell you how true it is — stop over complicating your analysis and just ask yourself “can this be a line?”.

Waterfalls I think take a close second.