Vegan Economics – My Story (Part 1)

Hi Everyone,

I would like to tell you about my story and why and how I became passionate about being vegan and why I believe economics can be used to benefit more than just human beings. For close to the first 38 years of my life I was a meat eater. I wore clothes made from animal products. I have even watched and paid to watch animals in entertainment. I don’t do this anymore. I am astounded that it took me this long to realise the damage my actions were causing.

From quite a young age I realised there was something wrong with the way world worked. The disconnection between people and nature seemed obvious but difficult to understand. I found a book in the library when I was in Secondary School. The book was titled ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ by Erich von Däniken. I was interested in the idea that humans were created by aliens. The theory seemed to explain why humans did not fit in with the rest of the planet. It was also a theory I had pondered myself before coming across the book. This, therefore, made the book even more appealing. Reading ‘Chariots of the Gods?’ was just information and therefore did not incite any action on my part.

Many years later I bought a book titled ‘The Biggest Secret’ by David Icke. The book followed a somewhat similar theme of aliens but went much deeper into the behind the scenes manipulation of the human race. I found the book an amazing read but I did not feel any real need to do anything or change the way I lived. At this time I was enlisted in the Singapore Armed Forces as part of National Service as at the time I was a permanent resident in Singapore. I experienced firsthand the darker side of humanity. The feeling of loss of freedom and control. This made the ideas expressed in ‘The Biggest Secret’ resonate with me.

After National Service I enrolled in the University of London External Program to complete my Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Management. I was definitely more interested in economics than management and I was much stronger at economics. I enjoyed learning about relationships between preferences and choices. I liked how economics extracted information from many areas and could potentially be very broad. I also liked the mathematically elements to it. I felt it was a subject that fully utilised my natural skills sets and therefore made me feel comfortable. I also felt that economics was an area that had great scope to grow and offer more than it was currently giving but I did not know exactly in what way.

After graduating with my Bachelor’s degree, I moved to Australia where I pursued my Master’s degree in Applied Economics. I am entirely grateful to my Granddad Norman for paying for this degree. As part of the Master’s program I was required to write a short thesis. I wanted to challenge the Nash approach to ‘Game Theory’ but I could not get a supervisor. I ended up writing my thesis on higher education.

The thesis was titled ‘Is the Pursuit of Higher Education worth the Cost?’. I challenged the ideas regarding pursuing education to maximise income. I favoured theories regarding utility maximisation across time. I investigated something know as intertemporal choice models. Many of these theories are relevant to the work I am currently involved with today. The work in my thesis revolved around maximising utility through consumerism. At the time it made sense and was consistent with almost everything I had learned in economics.

This is the end of Part 1 of my story. Thank you for reading Part 1, If you enjoyed Part 1 or interested in how my story progressed, I will be posting Part 2 in a couple of days.