When I first started economics, it was coming from a few years working in journalism. I greatly enjoyed all the parts of the journalistic process, from idea generation through reporting and interviews, writing, editing and publication design, but wanted to write about something important. 

In a kind of proto-Marxist way, without any clear understanding of what the term even meant, I thought that economics was the base of all the problems in the world. Not just poverty and inequality, but gender and racial discrimination, environmental deterioration, crime... it all came down to "economics" -- again, whatever that meant. The term "economics" stood in my mind as a smokescreen used to justify power relationships, protecting the rich from the poor. I entered the MA program at McGill convinced I was going to explode the thing from the inside, and continue writing about what was really wrong with the world.

So I actually remember the process of being brainwashed. My resistance gradually falling as the ridiculous assumptions of neoclassical theory were reinterpreted as a "wrong but sometimes useful" model, and I recognized the challenge of seeking models that were less of the first and more of the second. 

That was half a lifetime ago, and I never did get on with the public-facing writing very much. This page aims to be a place to do that in some limited way. The name is of course a play on real numbers, which are the union of the rational and irrational numbers, indicating that I expect much of what I say here will be wrong... but hopefully some will be useful.