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Philosophy

In my last year of econ undergrad, I was lucky enough to join Jerry Gaus's graduate seminars.

At the time I was disillusioned with economics, which had turned out to be about building cartoon models and torturing data with statistics. Most academic econ was more fiction writing than truth seeking.

In his seminars I found a different vision: an economics grounded in moral philosophy and political economy, influenced by evolutionary theory, anthropology, and complex systems. It was just one method in an approach to understanding our complex evolved social order that was much more honest and no less rigorous.

I think he is the teacher who most influenced me, though I didn't know it at the time. I started learning to program because I wanted to explore agent-based evolutionary models. And I found myself working years later on cryptoeconomic coordination games.
 
I never made it back to tell him this: he passed away four years ago today. I often wonder what he would think about Ethereum.

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