When you started to study economics as an undergrad, did you feel that the field of economics actually does a pretty good job of thinking about what is a fair society? No, I didn't. There was a military coup and even though the military sort of withdrew from the scene in name, its influence was palpable throughout my teenage years. And those events made me wonder what's the relationship between economics and politics. Is it the case that Turkey has a problematic economy, high inflation, high unemployment, lots of inequality because it has non-democratic politics or is it the other way around? Those were the kinds of issues that drew me to economics... Its questions weren't, at least at the undergraduate