Ujjaval Dhingra
Ujjaval works at His Majesty’s Treasury and leads on the economics to set the UK’s personal tax rates. He was previously on the Civil Service Economics Fast Stream, and before that studied undergraduate and masters degrees in Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) and University College London (UCL).
Why did you choose to study economics?
I was always interested in trying to improve society for the better. While most people may not associate economics with that purpose, the fundamental question in economics is how can we organise our scarce resources in the best way to make people now and in the future well off. I was fascinated in trying to answer this question and through studying economics more have realised how large an impact it can have on people’s lives.
How would you describe economics?
Economics touches all aspects of life. Whether it’s figuring out why you bought a certain item in a shop, to understanding why the world didn’t descend into nuclear war; economic theory is at the heart of all of everything you interact with day to day. When doing analysis or understanding theory, it can all seem very abstract but it’s one of the few subjects where you can see it having a tangible impact on all aspects of a person’s life.
If you had a time machine and could meet your 16-year-old self, what advice would you give them?
Try to understand what excites you! When you’re doing something you genuinely enjoy, it is one of the most rewarding things. Have curiosity to try a bunch of things and figure out what you actually like, and then go and do those things everyday.
What is your favourite part of economics?
I’ve always been very interested in Microeconomics, and in particular looking at interventions that have an impact that go against what you should think would happen. Economics provides you with the tools to really understand cause and effect, and understand why things happen in the world and what the true cause behind them was. It’s always very exciting to see some new study in economics that has found something the complete opposite to the way we thought things worked, and having proper evidence to back that up.
Is there anything you would do differently if you had the chance?
I would have learnt about a wider variety of topics in economics. There are so many different areas you can explore in economics and it can be easy to want to specialise in one as that seems the most interesting at the time. But, when you start learning about a whole different area of economics you start to find very interesting things that you were unaware of before.