Benjamin Stubbing
A recovering Aucklander (nobody's perfect), making amends in Wellington where I work for the Treasury in the Analytics and Insights team. We apply modelling and analytical expertise to transform data into policy insights, with a focus on microdata and microsimulation.
An arts graduate interested in natural sciences who stumbled upon computational methods out of necessity. Along the way I’ve been fortunate to work alongside people far more technically adept. As a result, I tend to be more communicative than most quants, and more of a shape rotator than most wordcells—a happy accident of straddling both worlds.
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
—T.S. Eliot, Choruses from "The Rock"
I’m enthusiastic about creating a future of abundance: building a materially healthy society that nourishes welfare, ameliorating places where bad rules impede the common good, and growing the things that make a nation great and the world a better place. ie, in Ezra Klein's words, the “stupidly simple” thesis that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things that we need.”
My chief vice has always been having too many interests; I love learning about anything and everything.* Take a look at my Bookshelf and Writing, e.g. here are the coolest things I learned last year.
More about me
- Ko te rarawa, ko ngai takoto, ko Ngati-Awa-Nui-a-Rangi aku iwi. Kei Tamaki Makaurau taku kāinga.
- Previously I’ve worked as a management consultant for PwC (briefly) and as a research assistant at Victoria University, the Human Rights Measurement Initiative (based in Motu), and the NZ Ministry of Education.
- To let off steam, I regularly have it handed to me in full-contact Origami, I play tennis with mildly more success, and on ocassion I dabble in violin and guitar after a fashion.
- Alongside work I'm studying an Honours degree in economics. As an undergrad I studied philosophy, politics, and economics. (Hayek used to say that nobody can be a great economist who is only an economist and that the economist who is only an economist is likely to become a nuisance if not a positive danger. In many respects Hayek was a prick). I focused on econometrics, quantitative comparative politics, and political philosophy.
- On weekends, I circulate an old-school links blast and I read very slowly.
- Some of my favourite books are: Dracula, Anna Karenina, Reasons and Persons, and The Man Who Was Thursday.
- Here's a repository of wisdom I've amassed, infinitely wise being that I am.
- If you don't know me (or don't know me that well) and you get the impression that we'd get along, feel free to email me: benstubbing(at)gmail(dot)com.
*Somehow the guy who’s really interested in absolutely everything is really boring.
—James Richardson
N.B., web-design is a bootleg imitation of Patrick Collison
.