economics

The Competitive Side of the Economist-Minded Data Scientist

What really gives economist-minded data scientists an edge is their ability to connect models to value creation. While many professionals can code or fine-tune hyperparameters, far fewer can trace a line from a data insight to an economic outcome — like cost reduction, revenue growth, or

Scarcity and Constraints

Another thing economists are obsessed with is scarcity . In data science, we talk about “big data” so much that we forget how scarce good data really is. Most organizations don’t have perfect information; they have partial, biased, noisy data collected under uncertain conditions.

Economists, for all their stereotypes, have one superpower that data scientists could really use: they see the world in terms of trade-offs, incentives, and equilibrium. They don’t ask what is happening; they ask why it’s happening, and what would happen if something changed .

Data scientists, on the other hand, are often trained to predict. The

Businesses became flooded with dashboards, predictions, and algorithms that worked perfectly in notebooks but fell flat in real life. Executives started asking a more basic question: “What does this model mean for us?”

That’s where I began to realize that data science — in its most useful form — isn’t really about the data. It’s about decisions. And

Now this has partially reversed. Western commodity traders’ power, at least when it comes to certain niche metals. Germany’s near-monopoly on tungsten smelting in the 1910s has been replaced by China’s monopoly on rare earth processing today. Konkel argues that “the Pax Americana was the resolution to the interwar raw materials problem.”

Memories of World War I shortages led the great powers to secure supply as geopolitical competition intensified in the 1930s.

Before the war, the European tungsten market resided in Hamburg, where more than 2000 tons of concentrated ore was sold annually. This was remarkable, considering Germany produced, at best, one percent of the world’s tungsten ore. Indeed, most of the world’s tungsten ore was being mined in parts of the British Empire, but more than half of global

The German “Octopus” and Processing Chokepoints

Yet geology wasn’t everything. Processing mattered too. And processing, the allied powers discovered in World War I, was disproportionately concentrated in Germany. Before the war, Germany’s geological deficits had driven its traders to scour the world for supply. They’d bought mines across the world

The U.S. wasn’t alone in having lots of steel but comparatively few alloying materials. “The four leading steelmaking countries in the world,” Konkel writes, “the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and France—accounted for 90 percent of the world’s steel production, but perhaps only 1 to 2 percent of the world’s manganese.” Most of the world’s