Re:Your Unvaccinated Kid Is Like a Vaccinated Grandma
by jfengel on Monday March 22, 2021 @10:22AM
(#26541222)
Economics is about the behavior of people with respect to scarce resources. It has a lot of overlap with other fields, including public health and epidemiology. The main tools of economics are statistics and mathematical modeling.
Economics is often thought of as being about money, but money is just a proxy for scarcity. You can have an economics in a society without money. Money is a compelling tool for counting, but it's not the only one. It's really the resources, and how people behave about them, that economists really want to count.
To make good models an economist needs domain knowledge, either by themselves or with collaborators. This author's work is precisely about health economics. Her dissertation was a hypothesis that hepatitis B was responsible for sex ratio disparities in China. (Additional data proved her wrong, and she published on that.)
At this point she's as much of a public explainer as an actual economist, the type who does TED talks. But her background in the economics of health is real. That's what real economics is supposed to look like.
Economics is often thought of as being about money, but money is just a proxy for scarcity. You can have an economics in a society without money. Money is a compelling tool for counting, but it's not the only one. It's really the resources, and how people behave about them, that economists really want to count.
To make good models an economist needs domain knowledge, either by themselves or with collaborators. This author's work is precisely about health economics. Her dissertation was a hypothesis that hepatitis B was responsible for sex ratio disparities in China. (Additional data proved her wrong, and she published on that.)
At this point she's as much of a public explainer as an actual economist, the type who does TED talks. But her background in the economics of health is real. That's what real economics is supposed to look like.