The most challenging economics class to teach is the first-year university class, for the students already ‘know’ all there is to know. This gels with what my grandfather used to tell me: when you start doing something new, you tend to be quite opinionated and wise with respect to the required solution or approach.

It’s only when you learn more about a subject, gain experience and become more of a specialist that it dawns on you just how little you know. I deliberately used the word ‘specialist’, and not ‘expert’, which is a word that I loathe. As Laurence J Peter once said, “an economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he/she predicted yesterday did not happen today”.

This brings me to economics and politics. If ever you have had the pleasure to teach (I deliberately avoid the word ‘lecture’) first-year economics, you will appreciate that there tends to be an extremely fine line between the two disciplines. As a teacher, I used to urge students to not use economics to try to determine a person’s political affiliation.

Concerning the difference between economics and politics, www.economicshelp.org states: “Economics is concerned with studying and influencing the economy. Politics, on the other hand, is the theory and practice of influencing people through the exercise of power.”

While preparing to write last week’s instalment of this column, I came across a now faded copy of my economics honours textbook, A History of Economic Thought, written by William J Barber. It was first published in 1967, but my copy was the 1987 edition. From this, are you able to guess my age (I won’t tell you if I bought it new or second hand)? Can you also guess the nationality of these economists: Adam Smith, Thomas Robert Malthus, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and arguably the two ‘rock stars’, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They and the supporting cast of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, JK Galbraith, Henry George and John Stuart Mill, besides others, were Caucasian, and predominantly European. For some, that might represent the political angle.

But rather than wanting to rewrite history and fixating on the injustice of the past, why not rather own the future? In the immortal words of Oscar Wilde, “the best revenge is to live well”. South Africans need to live well – as a consequence of their own doing, and not because of outside influence. As regards being dependent on outside influence, how has that worked out for South Africans? What I am proposing is for South Africa to seek a unique South African solution instead of seeking its economic chart from foreigners.

Instead of asking others – consultants and academics – for ideas, why not simply steal the ideas of the founding economists? In the words of the late former Apple CEO extraordinaire Steve Jobs: “Picasso had a saying, ‘good artists copy, great artists steal” – and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” But then again, there is nothing new. Yes, in economics you have heard it all. In the words of King Solomon, said to be the wisest man to have ever lived, “there is no new thing under the sun”. An echo of these words comes from an unlikely source, Marie Antoinette, who said: “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.”

My biggest fear is that the South African government is seemingly anticipating that others – outsiders – will find something new, and remarkable, while only ‘analysis paralysis’ (the inability to decide due to overthinking a challenge) awaits.

I leave you to ponder the words of Eryz Monzon: “When you think too much, instead of acting and doing things, you are overthinking. When you analyse, comment and repeat the same thoughts over and over again, instead of acting, you are overthinking.”