I am a PhD candidate in Economics at LUISS University, studying how deep-rooted cultural structures shape economic development. My academic work lives in journals and working papers — regressions, instruments, robustness checks. This site is the other half.
The premise
Before a phenomenon becomes a dataset, someone has to notice it. Before a market failure can be modelled, someone has to stand in the market and watch it fail. Ethnography — the slow, patient observation of how people actually live — is where economic intuition begins.
But traditional ethnography aspires to be comprehensive, systematic, authoritative. These field notes do not. They are lo-fi: partial, subjective, written on trains and in cafés, full of first impressions that may not survive scrutiny. What they lose in rigour, they gain in honesty. They capture the moment before the observation hardens into a hypothesis.
The method
Each field note follows a simple structure. First, the observation — raw, sensory, grounded in a specific place and time. What I saw, heard, smelled. The texture of a negotiation, the rhythm of a queue, the sound of a call to prayer over a construction site.
Then, the synthesis — where I switch hats from traveller to economist. What structure is at work here? Is this an informal institution? A coordination problem? A signal? This is where the lo-fi observation meets the hi-fi theory.
The organisation
I organise these notes in three dimensions:
Space — The Atlas is an interactive map. Each country page collects every field note from that region, pinned to where it was written.
Time — Field Notes are chronological. The journey between destinations — the night trains, border crossings, and waiting rooms where most of the interesting observations happen.
Concept — Threads are thematic patterns that surface across borders. When I notice the same dynamic in a Marrakech souk and a Shenzhen market, it becomes a thread — an evolving essay connecting scattered observations to the academic literature.
Why “lo-fi”
A lo-fi recording captures the room, the hiss, the imperfections. You hear the chair creak and the traffic outside. It is not polished, but it is present. These field notes work the same way. They are not peer-reviewed, not comprehensive, not objective. They are one person’s account of what it felt like to be in a specific place, noticing specific things, through the lens of someone who studies economies for a living.
The formal work is at jonathandries.com. This is the notebook behind it.