Eikonomics

About Eikonomics

Hello.

My name is Eiríkur Ragnarsson but no one ever calls me anything else than Eiki. I live with my wife and son in a 300 year old German barn in the German Hinterland. Eikonomics is the name of the analytical roof under which all my analysis lives.

I am born and raised in Iceland, I have a bachelors and a master’s degree in economics from the University of Otago in New Zealand. Since 2013 I have worked as an Economist, in London until around 2017 and since then in the great German city of Cologne (although I do most of my work in my office at home).

The objective Eikonomics is to produce solid, evidenced-based, deeply analytical analysis of anything that I find interesting at that point in time. It is a an outlet where I can let my attention disorder go wild–and sometimes, arguably– even flourish.

I try and keep the content that flows through this website mostly in English. Since I operate in three languages in my daily live, some mess is inevitable. Denglendic is a real issue. Someone should run a marathon for the cause.

I don’t have social media, so you can’t follow me anywhere. Unless you count LinkedIn (you can be my buddy there, not that I’m much fun there). Best way to reach me is via email:

My projects

  • My book is my proudest economics related achievement to date. It was published in 2021 and has so far sold around 1,000 hard copies and additional 300 people have listened to it on audio format. The book is in Icelandic and is based on my newspaper columns.
  • I wrote somewhere around 50-100 articles for the Icelandic newspaper Kjarninn. Shortly after Kjarninn merged with Stundin and together they became Heimildin, I decided that people have had enough of my column and I had reached my creative limit with the framework of my column.
  • When I was still an active user of the social media app Twitter I made a few Twitter bots. (Since I stopped using the app The bots have been mothballed.)
  1. The German vaccination bot. This was a bot I created in December 2020. Every day, this bot downloaded and processed the number of people that had been vaccinated in Germany, divided that by the population of Iceland and made chart. It was later expanded also to calculate the same metric, but for people who had been fully vaccinated. It is now mothballed.
  2. The German inflation bot. Another bot I made in 2020 and changed a bit recently. The program pulls Consumer Price Index data for the last 12 month period and plots two lines on a chart: price index and a randomly selected product from the basked of products that make up the aggregated index. The bot is a ghost, that is because it is inspired by my Icelandic inflation bot, who is also a ghost.
  3. The Icelandic inflation bot. Basically the same bot as the German one, but for Iceland. These bots are ghosts because in Iceland we poetically, reverse-anthropomorphize the economic indicator as a human like ghost. It is semi-archived, but I plan on reviving it soon.
  4. The Icelandic inflation bot on Mastodon. Basically the same thing as above, but only on Mastodon.
  • I played around with the GRID dashboards for a while. GRID is a great tool for taking a simple, MS Excel based, analysis and making it into a data-driven blog. I do however do so little analysis in Excel these days (R has taken over almost all my work), that I do not use the tool much anymore.

… and there is more. This is work in progress and updating this takes time and my time is very valuable to myself, so I’ll add to it during periods of low opportunity cost.