I vividly remember the moment the Prisoner's Dilemma was first drawn on the whiteboard in my
microeconomics class. The math made sense: betray the other person and receive a lighter
sentence. But I kept thinking — if people are as selfish as the game assumes, why does it
even matter what the other prisoner does?
When I glanced at the person sitting next to me, I wondered whether I would actually betray
them. That question stayed with me, because I knew the "rational" answer, yet I also knew I
would not choose it. That gap between what economics predicts and what people actually do
is what drew me to the field.
I saw the same tension at my desk in NOVA Corps. When a student arrived frustrated, I could
follow the manual and do the bare minimum, or I could invest the effort to build a real
solution. The second option cost more time — and it created trust and social capital, the
very forces that let institutions function.
A few months ago a student came in visibly upset — he didn't have stable housing and
needed something affordable immediately. I could have explained that we don't handle
housing. Instead I spent over an hour calling county programs and nonprofit contacts
until I found options that might work.
Those experiences reinforced my interest in economics as a discipline that explains not just
outcomes, but the behaviors that sustain systems over time.
