Monday 15 June 2009

Blog & Investment: Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal

I am more of a web-researcher, knowledge-starver than I am of a blog reader. What I mean is that, I look for information, but I don't really get them from blogs.
The reason being, partially due to my ignorance and partially due to my narrow-mindedness, I don't know too many blogs which are focused enough in their aims (and in English).

Some blogs aim to share their personal feelings with friends (understandable), some aim to promote their latest songs and videos (practical), some aim to spread their views on politics and gain support (strategic), but not my cup of tea. I want to learn something when I am reading, and thus I will share with you the blog of Paul Krugman (winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics), The Conscience of a Liberal.


I hope Dr. Krugman wouldn't mind my use of his blog logo here.
First of all, I have to say, I don't fully understand all the concepts that are discussed on his blog, but if you are truly interested in learning more about economics, you will get better as you read on.

I really find his short entries entertaining. In between the lines, you can see that Dr. Krugman is a person who knows his humour and he uses them at just the right amount. I like his "humour-in-sarcasm" and "truth-in-sarcasm" the most.

After reading his book, I know that he can really make understanding economics easy, and as we all know, making something look easy enhances the interests of learning. A great example can be found in his entry dated 9th Jun 2009, Dismal Hours, showing the diagram of the Aggregate Weekly Hour Index of the Total Private Industries plotting against Time.

What it actually indicates is very simple, that "the more hours people work, the better chance for the economy to recover". Year 2002 was the beginning of the last US recession, and it was marked at 100. So right now, the situation is a little worse than that time, and it is going down fast and shape, thus "the US data don’t even show stabilization, let alone recovery."[1]

So you see? It's not difficult to understand, isn't it?

Thank you Dr. Krugman!




He also posted some of his lecture notes on his blog!


Citation:
[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/dismal-hours/

Picture resources:
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs_v3/krugman/krugman_main.png
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/hours.png

Resources: