In Colombia, we’ve grown used to trusting the diploma. Someone graduates in economics and we assume they understand the economy. But anyone who has worked closely with economists, at universities, at banks, in government, knows that isn’t always true. There is an enormous difference between memorizing concepts and understanding a system, and that difference, I suspect, explains a good share of the bad economic decisions we make as a country. Economics is not a list of definitions you can learn by heart. It is a complex system: millions of people, companies, and governments making decisions every day, whose interactions produce outcomes that no one fully planned. Understanding inflation isn’t just knowing the definition of “a sustained increase in prices”; it means understanding how money moves, how credit responds, how people react to expectations, and how all of that feeds into everything else. It is a web of causes and effects that twists back on itself, and truly understan...