8. Economic inspiration

John Pierce: Well Ross, thank you for your time to give this interview today. I remember, it must have been more than, well nearly 30 years ago when I was doing my HSC economics exams, my economics teacher handing me out Ross Gittins articles to read and comment on. Over that sort of period of time, what's kept you going? Where does the enthusiasm and the interest in the subject come from?

Ross Gittins: Well, you make me feel very old, John. But yes, I mean it is an issue because, you know, I did my 34th Federal Budget lockup the other day. So you do have to have some source of, that keeps you interested and going. I think part of it is that I started out not remembering most of the economics that I did at university so I've been learning economics throughout that whole 30 years and I'd like to think that the stuff I'm writing about, say the Budget, this year was an improvement on what I was writing about it 10 years ago.

So I think there's some kind of, I hope there's some kind of evolutionary progress in my understanding of the topic, my ability to explain it. But the thing that really keeps me going is that economics is a very big topic. It's vast. It's not just micro, it's not just macro. When you get bored with macro you can move to micro-economics and go around there. I've actually got to the point where I find micro far more interesting than macro-economics. But there are new parts of economics and keeping up with those is what can really give me a buzz. You get information economics, the study of how what's happening on the Internet, the way it really fits the economic model, doesn't fit the economic model, that's the kind of stuff that really gets me going.