Osmosis

One of the blogs I follow is a local economist who is a college professor of economics here at the University in my hometown. He's a centrist Democrat (I'm a centrist Republican) whose style is very readable and even-handed. His blog lead me to another economist's blog, a professor at Princeton, who is a little more complicated in his analysis, and that one led me to the blog of a professor at Berkely, which can get really complicated. (In fact, I find it difficult to absorb what I'm reading and get quite frustrated whenever there is any noise or distraction in the room at all.)

I have no background in economics, so you can probably imagine that macro-economics is way over my head. Much of it is. Sometimes they will put up a chart and say something like "as you can see from this, it's obvious that..." Well, no, I can't, and no, it's not. But I'm trying. One of them admitted to having a problem with YHTMAAAIYP*. Indeed, for the uninitiated, the esoteric nature of some posts can be quite daunting. For a while I was reading QE as Queen Elizabeth. But when the facts are at variance with things politicians are saying, all three can be quite entertaining (which is why I started following them in the first place).

But I didn't realize that I was actually learning something until I turned on the TV the other night, and the Nightly Business Report was on PBS... and I actually understood what they were talking about. This amazed me so much that I was totally riveted to the program. In fact, I realized that I could explain some of this in an over-simplified manner using a Risk game and Monopoly money.

It is said that it takes about 8-14 months to learn a language by immersion. If I had that much success from just following a few blogs, perhaps I should be reading Spanish newspapers more often.

*You Have To Many Abreviations And Acronyms In Your Posts