Blown Off Course: An Introduction
In September 2026, I begin a PhD in economics at [I'll tell you later]. This is not where I expected to be.
For sixteen years I worked in finance in Kuwait. I understood markets from the inside, the way you understand something when your job depends on getting it right. Then the questions that wouldn't leave me alone stopped being questions about markets and started being questions about people. What shapes the choices people make about their own lives, their education, their savings, their futures? How much of that is them, and how much is the water they swim in? And when the water turns toxic, war, financial collapse, natural disaster, what determines whether a society recovers or doesn't? What do institutions do to human beings over time? How does history embed itself in the present?
So I left. I went back to school. And somewhere in the middle of my master's degree, I started accumulating something: pages and pages of notes from seminars, reading groups, and papers that stopped me cold. Economists working on questions that matter, presenting findings that deserve a wider audience than the room they were presented in.
That's the first reason this exists. Research shouldn't be gatekept. The seminar circuit, the working paper archives, the journal articles behind paywalls. They contain some of the most important thinking being done about human lives and human societies. Most of it never reaches the people it's most relevant to. That seems wrong to me, and I'd like to do something small about it.
The second reason is frustration. I read the economics coverage in major publications and I find it increasingly agenda-driven, increasingly thin, increasingly uninterested in the actual complexity of what researchers are finding. I wanted somewhere that took the work seriously on its own terms, not as ammunition for a predetermined conclusion, but as genuine inquiry worth understanding.
Blown Off Course is my attempt at that somewhere.
It's a reading journal and seminar notebook organized around a single theme: human capital. How people learn, work, and build lives. What investments in human beings actually produce. What gets in the way: disaster, institutions, history, policy, bad luck. It is the theme that runs through my own research, and through the questions I've been asking since long before I had the language of economics to ask them with.
I'll write about papers and books that I've read carefully and have something to say about. I'll write dispatches from seminars I've attended. Eventually I hope to have conversations with the researchers themselves. Everything here will be written for anyone who is curious. Not just economists, not just academics, but anyone who thinks seriously about how the world works and why it works the way it does.
The name comes from my thesis. It also comes from my life. To be blown off course is not a failure of navigation. It is sometimes how you find the territory worth mapping.
I'm glad you're here.
Aisha Alsayegh Boston, March 2026