credentials as an armchair economist

I have been trying to pass myself off as a normal guy rather than embracing my entirely defensible status as an abnormally smart person. I recently realized that there is a big disconnect between the two.

I realized that "i was the organizational treasurer, and the common gateway interface standard was just released, so I decided to try to solve the larger problem instead of just our instance" although entirely true, is too self-deprecating to instill, on its merits alone, confidence in me as a financeer.

Which is what I need to do, to make TipJar fly like the condor it certainly still has the potential to become, now that PayPal has done all the pioneering marketing and legal precedent work.

In bank management class -- that's what I'm taking n MBA school this semester -- last week we had a guest speaker, the CEO of a rapidly growing bank and fellow UMKC graduate, who talked about competitive threats from non-bank entities such as PayPal.

Anyway I want to throw down about my credentials as an armchair economist. The story starts with reading "The Nine Nations Of North America" when I was in high school. Or maybe the story starts with reading the technical analyses of the Monopoly board in "The Monopoly Book" when I was a child.

I was on an economics track, a possible minor, through college. I took Economic Geography at Boston U in 1985. Economic Geography is the study of how things come to be located where they are, from an economic perspective. The distribution of convenience stores, for instance. Why they grow corn in Iowa and broccoli in Virginia.

The following year I took Economic Anthropology at Antioch. Economic Anthropology is the study of the different attitudes of different cultures towards belongings, and trade, and posessions, and markets. Really a fascinating field, which can open your eyes to see a lot of things that you would otherwise accept as absolute, immersed in the culture you find yourself immersed in, as merely one of a variety of alternatives. Well any anthropology class will do that for you, that's what makes studying anthropology fun.

So that's it, aside from the paper on the history of paper money that I wrote for technical writing class -- having been acquainted with E. Anth. in the past I found relevant books by Karl Polanyi -- he's in any university library

I don't like writing puff pieces on myself, it feels vain and silly.

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