I'm certainly nothing like an actual degreed economist. That was my college roommate for a while. He was a grad student in macroeconomics getting his dissertation ready, and wanted me to look at the final draft and help him type the equations on my IBM Selectric typewriter. These things were expensive and I was lucky to have it for a song after the business crash.

People already knew I was the only kid typing my chemistry homework onto the handout sheets, and it did look pretty sharp if I do say so myself :)

Well, I didn't like all his equations and we went over all the text in pretty good detail too, but got done making the equations on the strips exactly as he had drawn. Some drafting pens were also used for characters the IBM did not have. He would have to physically cut then paste each typed equation into the proper space between paragraphs that he had on his manually typewritten text.

By then I was about as old as you could be before you're no longer a teenager, so I was a bit rusty and not up-to-date with the stock market or anything else financially, even though I had started financial analysis as a preteen and made some people some good money (as an actual teenager by then), it had been years since the crash.

So we talked it over philosophically about the equations for a number of weeks and things became a lot clearer to both of us. He ended up throwing out the whole dissertation !

Anyway, he transferred to a different grad school, under a different PhD he earned his own PhD and ended up becoming a professor.

At a place out west I had never heard of called Stanford.

Thanks for reminding me :)