Hi there, I'm Francois Stiennon. I studied economics at Warwick and Cambridge. During my time as a student, I found it difficult to gain a deep intuition for how theoretical models work from reading textbooks. Hence, I built tools to visualise and interact with the models. By being able to see how things work for myself, I was able to gain a much deeper understanding for the theory, which eventually allowed me to appreciate its beauty and relevance to the outside world.

I have since developed an interest in how to make the learning process more efficient through interactive software tools. This website is a way for me to experiment and explore my ideas for how to do this. I am a big believer in learning things online. I haven't received any formal training in computer science/programming. Besides economics, my interests include statistics and machine learning.

Economics is often criticized as detached from the real world and too reliant on mathematical models and unreasonable assumptions. It is important to keep in mind that these models are not intended to be realistic descriptions of how the economy works. Instead, they can be seen as stories which contain ideas and intuitions which can be applied to analysing the economy. Hence the models themselves are not always very insightful, but it is worth the effort to undersand them as a first step. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to build up intuition for these models and I want to pass on that intuition to you.

eLabs is an open source software project, hosted here on GitHub. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch. You can email me at francois.stiennon[at]gmail.com. I hope you enjoy using eLabs as much as I enjoy building it! You can find eLabs on facebook. If you are looking for the old version of eLabs, click here. I am also on LinkedIn and GitHub. Finally, here is a picture of me: