The Day I Became a "PhD Comics" Character

Today I became one of those PhDComics characters. I was so pleasantly working at home, gathering data and finding sources for the dissertation, when I received an email from my fellows at NYU telling me about a job talk close to my research topic ("Taxation in Latin American Democracies").

1.) I downloaded the paper, and then I saw the title:

“Inequality and Redistribution Across Two Centuries: The Path-Dependent Politics of Taxation” (in Latin America)

2.) I ran downstairs in panic. I tried to breath. I walked upstairs again. I then started to read the paper, almost half a dissertation (if not entirely one).


3.) I remembered from PhD Comics what to do in this kind of situations. So I grabbed the paper and started to read it. It was pretty interesting. It was pretty close to my findings, to my approach. Probably we drawn the same expectations about the data from the same literature. We had similar intuitions. We both shared that pessimistic-but-try-to-solve-the-puzzle-please approach to the source of inequality in the continent. I read more and more the masterpiece...



4.) I checked the conclusions... They were quite strong, but leaving a loooot of room



5.) Then I imagined potential solutions for our overlapping... ;-)

6. And I also learned the lesson! :-)