The path towards a career in economics was largely set out over two decades ago and, try as I might to deviate from the script, it looks to have come full circle.

When I was a little Tim, about the age of seven or eight, a supply teacher, Miss Anna McDermott, had the class sat on a mat in the corner of the room and asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up.

You might find it strange that I know her name. It’s because she was the daughter of chain-smoking teacher Cuthbert Wilberforce McDermott (they don’t make names like that anymore!) that it’s stayed in my head. I remember him particularly for iterating that “It’s pronounced ‘aitch’ not ‘haitch’!”, introducing me to the phrases “You’re about as much use as a chocolate teapot/an ashtray on a motorbike!”, and for busting me when I got out of reading class on religious grounds (the book being read was The Worst Witch), seeing as the book I took to read privately was Roald Dahl’s The Witches.

Anyway, back on track. We were asked what we wanted to do when we grew up. I remember one lad saying he wanted to be a fisherman. I’m sure others probably wanted to be dancers, actors, footballers, the usual. My answer was a little unusual for one so young: “I want to do economics.”

In fact, it’s doubly unusual on the basis that I didn’t know what economics was.

To this day, I don’t know where that answer came from. I think that it was most likely that I knew my father had ‘done’ economics and, as he was the opinion-leader and ‘rich one’ in our family group in which the other men worked in factories, I suppose I fancied a bit of that myself and so sought to emulate him.

This all cemented itself one Saturday, which I’ve narrowed down to being September 23rd, 1989, (since I’m sure it was the day that Man City beat Man United 5-1, this being highlighted on the lunchtime edition of Saint & Greavsie). My dad had driven up to Leeds to do some work for a firm called Bateman as a favour to his friend, a nice German chap called Klaus Irrgang.

I didn’t actually realise that Klaus (or ‘Mr Irrgang’ as my dad chided me, in spite of the fact that he’d always spoken of ‘Klaus’ and had never even informed me of the chap’s surname) wasn’t English, testament to his language skills and indicative of my young age.

Anyway, Klaus gave dad four twenty-pound notes as payment (one for each of dad’s kids) and it was more confirmation for me that this is the direction that I wanted to go in. Nice people giving you money, I thought I’d have a bit of that.

I should point out that my dad is a management accountant, but I wasn’t aware of that. It was just that he had ‘done economics’ that I had registered. I’ve never had any interest whatsoever in accountancy and, honestly, can’t see why anyone would.

I do recall my GCSE Business Studies teacher, Mr Shardlow, demonstrating the point that a scarcity of supply leads to a higher cost by citing the wage packets of accountants.

Realistically, he should’ve mentioned that it’s an artificial scarcity caused by the professional bodies limiting membership in the goal of pushing up wages, but his explanation was a little more memorable: “They have to be high wages to compensate for the job being so boring. Who’d wanna do a job like that otherwise?”

By the time of choosing A-levels, French had become something that I particularly enjoyed and I was good at it compared to the other pupils. (I was woefully underprepared really, but was happily ignorant of this at the time.) Nonetheless, I still chose economics as an option without knowing anything about it. (The fact that the head of economics sold it as a good choice on the basis that ‘economists rule the world!’ didn’t really play a factor: I was always going to choose it.)

A-levels came and went. I wasn’t particularly interested in the subject, it all seeming rather abstract and irrelevant to me. ‘In the long run, Aggregate Supply is a vertical line. It’s like potatoes growing in a garden. Eventually the supply of free space runs out, and they grow up the wall.’ That was one of the more memorable explanations

Anyway, this thing about “doing economics” made choosing my university course pretty straightforward. I went to Leicester (on the basis that I wouldn’t know on which criteria to choose between other universities).

Leading up to choosing courses the French assistant actually asked me whether I would go on to study French at university, and I replied that though it was my favourite subject, I wouldn’t, because I’d never be fluent. Quite ironic, given that just three years later I was speaking better French than people who studied it at university.

Here’s the big thing: I really didn’t like economics. I attended all my lectures and, for the first few weeks, copied out my notes diligently and neatly, but I never read around the subject, didn’t see how modelling applied to the real world, couldn’t envisage a time when I’d never need to use the statistical techniques in any field. My marks were pretty middling, reflecting my lack of effort in anything other than turning up to lectures and tutorials, in which I was actually a keen participant.

One day in a second-year macroeconomics class, the lecturer—a top professor whom I’ve always liked and respected—started that morning’s call with an overhead projection talking of an ‘Erasmus’ year abroad. I’ve never really understood why, but I knew I was going to do that straightaway.

Going to Toulouse was the best thing I ever did, and would count as the best year of my life.

When I returned I was energised and suddenly very alert of the fact that my degree mark would be a 2:2 without a lot of effort on my side. I set myself the target of getting seven firsts in my eight modules in order to get a first overall. Highly unrealistic, especially given my record, and it’s no surprise that I didn’t quite pull it off. I was proud, though, of the fact that I got firsts in four of my modules (including the advanced micro- and macroeconomics courses) and was three percentage points off one in my dissertation (counted as two modules).

It was explained to me that it was a very good piece of work, but couldn’t be considered a first because ‘The Euro & The UK’ was a much-covered subject and so wasn’t original.

I took supplementary modules in Italian and got a first in them too, so it was quite a successful year, even if it turned out to be too little too late to pull my overall grade around.

I returned to Toulouse for a year but had now been bitten by the bullet. I had learned to enjoy economics rather than passively ‘do’ it and, once moving into specialised areas of interest (such as Eastern Europe), saw how it would apply in the real world.

I returned to England somewhat deflated and took a job in local government. When the new academic year rolled around, I started doing an MSc in economics and had taken on a teaching role at university, on top of keeping my job in local government.

Ostensibly I was supposed to work eight hours on Saturday and Sunday followed by six hours on a weeknight, repeat again, then do three weeknights on my weekend off.

In practice we were so short-staffed that I worked five-, six-, and seven-day weeks. Whereas other people could invest 50 hours a week in their MSC, I couldn’t, which caused a problem for me at the beginning of the course, when a recap in Advanced Quantitative Methods, a core module, baffled me. The lecturer went over such things as transposing matrices and so forth as something we already knew. I didn’t. I had bought a textbook on the subject of mathematics for economists and read it the month before on holiday, but this was all new.

I wouldn’t have been able to catch up with the basics in time and, after two weeks of trying, had to switch to a degree in which AQM wasn’t a core module. I changed to MSc Financial Economics and, as irony would have it, scored a distinction in the basic QM module. Unfortunately, I had no interest at all in finance, and my marks reflected that, except in those optional modules I personally chose for myself, such as development.

My dissertation proved an unusual experience, in that I did the whole lot, start to finish by myself. I had left things late, of course, but chose to write one on child labour in Nicaragua, since it combined a bunch of my interests: It allowed me to write about something emotive, counter conventional opinion, and use foreign-language documentation as sources. I didn’t get the first that I was after, but wasn’t far off.
Considering that I’d done the whole lot myself using techniques that I hadn’t met before, and typed it up in about two days (nine thousand words in the last night), I was quite happy.

So now I had come full circle. I had ‘done’ economics, just as I’d said I would as a child. I’d studied it to MSc level, taught it to undergraduates, undertaken my own research, learnt to see it in use in the real world, and had finally come to love the subject.

I was recommended for a PhD by a professor to one of his colleagues, which was not only a surprise, but also a nice nod that I’d actually become someone who could make a living in the field. Unfortunately, after a year which featured high-level study in an area that I didn’t particularly like, eight to ten hours of teaching a week, and a regular job that usually hit hours equivalent to full time, I was too weary to think of taking on another three or four years where I would feel it necessary to have a job on the side. The pace was too much to keep up and I didn’t want to live without money, so it wasn’t an option.

After leaving, I started to buy more and more casual books in the area, and quite shockingly discovered that the Journal of Economic Literature contains some surprisingly reader-friendly articles.

I was reading more and more language-based things too. The problem, and one that I wouldn’t be able to answer for the next three years, was how to somehow combine my training in economics with my interest in language and linguistics.

2005, 2006, and 2007 elapsed. There had been no progress at all, but that hadn’t worried me, since I’d been banking a lot of money by combining roles at work. My busiest week saw my timesheet register 92.25 hours. Professional success briefly arrived and I got to don a bow tie on a few occasion, but I couldn’t keep up the pace forever, and left at the end of 2006.

2007 was a ‘me’ year, one in which I recharged the batteries and got involved with some language work for an education charity, and got to live (briefly) in Germany. I had known that I would do a PhD sometime, to the point where I had looked into taking a job in Korea for a couple of years which would generate enough residual income for me to live comfortably in the UK without earning, but then I met Radio. Korea or her. It wasn’t a contest with any room for debate, and I stayed. I was 28 and decided that it was time to get out of the rut, eventually.

I spoke with a couple of professors for help. Professor Erich-Dieter Krause, with whom I spoke in Germany, gave me a very succinct answer to the question “Can you think of any way of combining language and economics?” ― “No.” Well, “ne”, since we were speaking in Esperanto.

Professor David Fielding, now head of department at the University of Otago in New Zealand, was much more helpful, linking me to the website of Professor Barry Chiswick, whose work centres on immigration and how language affects choice of destination and earning potential after arrival. I bought Professor Chiswick’s book (NINETY-NINE pounds!) then asked him for some advice. A nice man, he suggested a couple of proposals that I could research.

From that, I asked Professor Gianni de Fraja for an appointment. My thinking was that he could explain the system of grants and whatnot, since his admin role was head of the PhD programme at Leicester. He remembered me, invited me in, and immediately asked me what my proposal was. We discussed it, then he pointed me in a better direction.

The better direction is superb. I now get to do exactly what I’ve been wanting to do for years: combine economics and language-knowledge. It’s been an unusual journey, but it looks as though twenty years after first eliciting it, I’ll finally be a grown-up who gets to “do economics”.