“You have to find what works for you,” says Dr Tumisang Loate-Ntsoko

Dr Tumisang Loate-Ntsoko recently had a lunch she is not going to forget in a hurry. And it was not because of the food. In fact, she had to think long and hard to remember what she had eaten.

The meal was memorable because she ate it with one of her heroes, macroeconomist and Nobel Laureate, Christopher A Sims, whose methodology of analysing relationships between economic variables is something which she has studied and applied in her own research.

Loate-Ntsoko experienced this lunch of a lifetime during the 7th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which took place in Lindau on the island of the same name, on the banks of Lake Constance in Germany. She was one of 12 young economists from South Africa selected to attend the five-day event, held from 23 to 27 August. It had originally been scheduled to take place last year but was postponed because of COVID-19.

The Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) nominated the South African contingent, who were funded by the Department of Science and Innovation, and joined a group in Lindau totalling 300 young economists from around the world. Selection criteria included being under 35 years of age, ranked among the top of their class or cohort, strongly recommended by their academic advisor, and with a promising research agenda.

Part of the experience is being able to register to have lunch or go on a walk with nine other young economists and the Nobel Laureate of your choice. Loate-Ntsoko is still raving about her meal with Sims, an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Princeton University in the US, who impressed her to no end. She was bowled over that at the age of 79 he is still doing research “and still passionate about it. How motivating,” she said.

And she was stunned at how readily he engaged with her. “These are people who've been acknowledged for being the best in their field, yet they are very humble and willing to share, not just the technical side of what they do, but also on a more personal level and career-related,” she said. “He was as friendly as if we were colleagues of similar experience.”

One of the questions she asked Sims was about writing papers for academic journals, “because it's sometimes very hard”, she said.  She mentioned reading about an economist who had said that those who publish, write something every day, even if it is just two sentences, so that it doesn’t become a sprint at the end.

Sims responded with a different approach. He said when he has to write, he spends most of the time thinking and pottering about the house. Then in the final week before deadline, he writes. “You have to find what works for you,” he told her.

Unsurprisingly, Loate-Ntsoko also asked him if it were possible to be a good macroeconomist when young, without the in-depth knowledge of the many factors that influence the discipline (which comes with experience). Loate-Ntsoko asked this because she cares about wanting to achieve. More specifically, it is what she described as her “yearning to know more”, which led her to arrive at UP in 2012 as a part-time master’s student and then happily continue studying when she was given the opportunity to do a PhD fulltime. She hasn’t left her academic home of UP since.

Growing up in the village of Fafung in the North-West, an hour’s drive from Brits, her “yearning to know more” saw her change academic directions. She started with technical subjects such as motor mechanics at Hebron Technical & Commercial High School, then did information technology for her undergraduate degree at the University of Johannesburg, before swapping to economics in honours.

That yearning is still part of her. It has driven her to the position where her former master’s and PhD supervisor, whom “I enjoyed working with”, she said, Professor Nicola Viegi, head of the Economics Department, is now her boss.

Loate-Ntsoko’s curiosity and drive make her stand out. No wonder she won the Economic Society of South Africa’s Founder’s Medal in 2019 for the best PhD study in the country, and is sponsored by the South African Reserve Bank Chair. And she not only clinched the chance to attend this prestigious Lindau Meeting but was one of 60 young economists from the pool of 300 whose proposal to present a paper there was accepted. Although it was only a six-minute presentation, it was “a chance to get one’s ideas heard by Nobel Laureates as well as others researching in the same field,” she said of her talk on the macroeconomic effect of legislated personal income tax changes in SA between 1996 and 2019.

“I have been at UP fulltime since 2014. This is the longest I have been at one place. I am still here and enjoying the work – and the travelling,” said Loate-Ntsoko, whose work has already taken her to Oxford University, Chile, Greece – twice -  and since returning from Germany, to present a paper in Slovenia.