Dear friends, colleagues and fellow students,
For about a year I have been directing the Real Economics Association, a think tank through which I collaborated with so many fascinating people from economists, students, authors, publishers and politicians to underscore the undeniable flaws and weaknesses of our current economics. My main goal has been to enable every voice that is not traditionally accepted or fully received, to be heard and understood in this think tank’s community. I learnt throughout my time at the REA how to run a website effectively, how to engage with a global audience of financial activists and professors and how to ameliorate the ever-harder outreach of our social media pages in the age of bombardment of useless overwhelming information. I had an incredible time with my fellow writers and our contributors, discussing their research and columns and I’m thanking them all as I learnt so much from reading their thoughts and having meaningful conversations with them.
After a very assiduous review of my vision for the website, and my personal development goals and commitments, I decided to step down as the founder-director of this think tank and therefore we’ll close permanently from October 3rd. This decision will not affect the availability of the website and works of our previous contributors, however no further publication will be released.
This is merely a personal decision and the main reason for this is due to my desire for learning more and speaking less. If you become a founder, without having built a clear foundation for your thoughts, knowledge and ambitions, you’ll most definitely not succeed. I see this very need in me to expand my very limited knowledge of economics, finance, politics and international relations before I can lead an institution. Spending time arranging other people’s columns will take your time from personal growth away and all of a sudden your unextinguishable hunger for learning will fade in preoccupation of raising more followers for your think tank’s page. This is not the way I’ll choose, although some might. Being a dedicated founder takes much more time, effort, energy and responsibility than it seems, particularly when you decide to go “all in”. You will no longer recognise yourself as you, but a title and a company name. I recently tried to keep these two separate, but as I found myself unable, I thought one has to go– and it was not me but my creature.
I am truly grateful to Joe Neary, Sophia Measures and Oliver Miller for supporting me and contributing constantly to the website and I wish to collaborate with them in years ahead in other ways.
Thank you all for reading this.
Ali Hashemifara