Holiday Plan

My holidays have just begun. I say this even though its been a good week or so since my last exam paper, which is technically when the holidays begin. This is because I have only now began to carry out my grand holiday plan. My super grand uber cool ultimate holiday plan is to... *drumroll please* READ! This may sound trivial but I found that even though I think I read well, I was a little surprised that I really don't remember that much of what I read say, a day after I read it. This may not seem like such a big deal until you consider that students of all types, myself included, need a modicum of reading skill that is not customarily taught in schools.

To this end, I dusted off a book by British memory guru Tony Buzan that had been lying around my home and began to pry at the secrets of reading. Eventually, people come to the realization that all truly good advice is to a good degree just plain common sense. That was the case with Tony Buzan's reading tips too. In summary, he advises to read faster, concentrate harder, use our fingers as pointing aids and drink lots of coffee. I may or may not have made the last 2 up, make up your own mind about that. Now doesn't that make you feel like an indignant consumer who's been cheated of good money? When we pay money for books, CDs, seminars etc that purportedly teach us how to be successful, beautiful, confident, motivated, make money, the list goes on, how much of it is truly useful, in the way that the first typewriter was to an writer. My guess would be none. All good information passes through the human population rapidly, like gossip. You need only consider the first time you learned to fold a paper crane. You passed it on to a friend, and in no time at all, the whole school was teeming with paper birds.

What is the point of all this, you rightly ask. The point is this, if you already knew and agreed with what I just wrote above, you have proven that information of the good sort passes quickly indeed. The question then becomes, why do we even pay for books by people like Tony Buzan?

I don't honestly know right now, though I'll be sure to post something on that if and when I get one.

PS. About my holiday plan, I still intend to read and practice to read more effectively too. My first book will be "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond which I will serialize into a series of summary posts with my humble thoughts on the subject.

Funniest Economics video ever!

I was reading through Steven Levitt's blog today when I came across this link to a student video project at Columbia University's Business School. It's a hilarious take on a student's dissatisfaction with the appointment of Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve. For the non-economists, the Federal Reserve is the US' version of our Bank Negara or Singapore's MAS.

The same video can be viewed here.



The video is doubly funny for me because the textbook that the lead singer discredits is the same textbook that I used for my Macroeconomics I module last semester.


Here reproduced for your convenience.

To be fair, I didn't think the textbook was as bad as the singer in the video made it out to be. Its actually pretty good, considering that an average student like myself can understand it without too much mind-numbing effort and concentration.Is there a lesson to be learned from all this? yes. Econs textbooks are so uncool that even fake music videos make fun of them. What is an econs major to do?

The solution?

An elegant, comprehensive and final one.