I'm Leonardo Tsaousi, an economist with a Master's in Economic Theory. My work lives at the intersection of mathematical rigour and real-world complexity — where Lagrangian optimisation meets the labour market, and where differential equations trace the dynamics of growth.
This space is where I think out loud. About the mathematics that governs markets. About the policies that shape lives. About the stubborn beauty of equilibrium — and what happens when it breaks.
I believe economics is too important to be left unexamined, and too beautiful to be left unexplained.
«The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.»
— F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
How the 2015 Greek negotiations became the most expensive game of chicken in modern economic history — and what Nash equilibrium tells us about why it failed.
350,000 Greeks emigrated between 2010–2019. When the expected utility of leaving exceeds staying, migration isn't tragedy — it's optimisation under constraint.
An intuitive guide to constrained optimisation. How the method that terrifies students is actually the most elegant idea in microeconomics.
Every macro model predicted permanent stagnation after the memoranda. Greece topped The Economist's 2023 performance rankings. This essay asks: what happens when the economy doesn't read the textbooks? A journey through the mathematics of resilience, the limits of prediction, and the stubborn tendency of complex systems to surprise their modellers.
Read the full essay →Shorter pieces, open questions, work in progress.
The labour market doesn't just measure employment — it measures how many people still believe that sending a CV matters. When discouraged workers exit the statistics, we lose more than data points.
When a 22-year-old signs for a credit card, they're not accessing capital — they're borrowing from a future self they haven't met yet. A note on intertemporal choice and the discount rates we never calculate.
It's wrong. Everyone knows it's wrong. Hicks himself said it was wrong. And yet — no framework in macroeconomics teaches you to think in general equilibrium faster. A defence of beautiful lies.
Inequality in Greece doesn't live in the Gini coefficient. It lives in who can afford the €1.50 coffee and who pretends they've already had one. On the micro-economics of social performance.
You don't need to love calculus. You need to see that dy/dt = ry is the story of compound interest, population growth, and why debt spirals are not metaphors — they're mathematics.
Public beaches privatised. Archaeological sites underfunded. Tax evasion as a Nash equilibrium where everyone defects. On collective action failures in a country that invented the concept of the polis.
One essay per week. Mathematics, economics, and the questions that keep me up at night. No spam, no clickbait — just ideas worth thinking about.