About me

Hey there,

I am a 22 year-old Chinese born Singaporean currently living in the most expensive city in the world. I graduated from Dunman High School in 2012, and I’m now a penultimate year economics student at the London School of Economics.

I am a dreamer of economics and an aspiring pianist. I still have hopes to become a better writer.

I started this blog nearly 5 years ago in 2012 when I was still an A-Levels student. At that point of time, I was struggling to make sense of the world from an economics perspective. Much of what I had learned then was…perhaps too singular to be applied directly and conveniently to the real world. It didn’t take much writing to make me realize that understanding complexities has become an integral part of my life purpose.

Studying economics for the past few years made me learn more about it as a way of thinking than as a functional model in its own right. This has been so because economics has surrounded me with questions that often has no right answers. I have seen how fundamental values of the human race have been questioned by the moral limits of markets, and how the assumed understandings of human behaviour (or the market, assuming this is not a misnomer in the context) in general have evolved based on the implications from politics, philosophy, law, math and even the sciences. The conflicting nature of its theories and ideologies also intrigue me with a never ending source of engagement.

With the history and onset of crises from all over the world (e.g. irrational exuberance culminating to the 2008 crises, eurozone monetary union crisis, japan’s liquidity trap and deflationary era), its ideologies and theories have been questioned well enough to qualify it as a work in progress. The subject of economics is in currently a state of growth and change, and being involved in its process of revolution makes studying it ever more important and fascinating. Nothing is old for economists, and even more for economists-to-be.

Writing, I realized on the other hand, is a form of acquired love. It is essentially .. a method of thinking. In this age where we are flooded with information from everywhere, nothing beats being able to write with a deep focus and to being able to ‘filter the determinant from the noise.’ Therefore, this blog is at best both a selfish and a premature effort that I make to understand such complexity in a manner that appeals to me. Ultimately, I hope this blog can inspire many others to live their life purposes and chase what makes them feel alive as well.

Behind this blossoming conviction to be on that front line is a feeling of inadequacy, for my mind has been imprisoned by knowledge. Why do alphabets have that order? Why do different frequencies always produce that tone? Why is 1+1=2? You see, that is the problem.

We just know.

In this world of possibility, there is so much to learn and unlearn.

Sitong

12th March, 2014 (revised on 12th Jul, 2016)

S.Ding5@lse.ac.uk