Ottawa

Steve the Economist

Also from that Sun interview.

“As you know, I’m an economist and a big believer in a market economy.”

Setting aside recent evidence to the contrary (No recession! No deficit! Buying opportunities!), the supporting documentation for the Prime Minister’s status as “an economist,” would seem to be his undergraduate and Master’s degrees in economics. His career beyond his studies has been solely devoted to politics (Kady has a small, but valid, quibble with this below). But his status as “an economist” has periodically been asserted since the metaphorical wheels came off the economy.

So is the Prime  Minister an economist? Good question.

If you graduated with a degree in chemistry, then pursued a career in shoe sales, could you call yourself a chemist?

If you graduated with a degree in math, then spent the rest of your life working as a chef in a fancy restaurant, could you consider yourself a mathematician?

If you graduated with an English degree and were left only to wonder for the rest of your life why you bothered to get an English degree, could you, at the very least, identify yourself until your dying day as a literary scholar?

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