[Book Review:] A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics by David A. Moss

I started out my undergraduate studies as an ambivalent pre-med student. I’d always excelled in my language arts classes without much effort, but I had to apply myself more to get those same high marks in the sciences. I thought I could have the best of both worlds and double major in English and Biology, but I had my doubts. When I expressed my trepidation about the rigorousness of the pre-med coursework, my guidance counselor’s advice for my first semester was, essentially, “Just take classes that sound interesting to you! You should have some fun your first semester, don't overload yourself with those boring pre-med classes!”

I looked at a variety of classes offered my first semester, but I was too intimidated to register for any economics or business courses listed in the catalog. Word on the street was that Economics 101 was a weeder course many students failed. As the first semester went on, a friend of one of my roommates who seemed to spend more time in our dorm room than the library struggled with the class and, ultimately, failed. This confirmed my impression that passing the introductory economics class would be impossibly difficult for me. I graduated four years later without having taken a single economics course.

In hindsight, Occam’s razor favors the theory that this friend of my roommate was simply not a very good student. She spent an awful lot of time complaining about schoolwork as she and my roommates gussied themselves up while “pre-gaming” for frat parties. If she’d allocated more of her time to memorizing economic theories and mathematical formulas, she would've had a better chance of passing Econ 101.

Ten years later, this book has provided me with the introduction to economics I never got at my university, nor from my high school, for that matter. Unlike the cutthroat design of Econ 101 at University of Michigan, this book is not designed to suss out who will fail the course and drop out of business school. The author does present the reader with mathematical formulas and economic theories, but even those who haven’t picked up a math textbook in years will be able to comprehend them. The charts, graphs, and figures provided are all relevant and expounded upon in the text. The theory of comparative advantage is fleshed out by the historical account of political economist David Ricardo arguing against British lawmakers’ protectionist trade policies in 1817. The relationship between the US Federal Reserve and short-term interest rates is compared to the speedometer and gas pedal on a car. If you can understand layman’s explanations of these theories and formulas, you can then understand how these same principles apply to a nation’s economy on a massive scale.

Most, if not all, macroeconomic principles were presented in a nuanced way. The reader is not encouraged to memorize these theories as though they are laws of physics. The author presents economics as an imperfect science, as actual economic conditions are messier than the principles appear on paper. He argues that learning these fundamentals of macroeconomics is important because "only by understanding the baseline relationships can you begin to recognize departures from the rule and, most important, begin to formulate reasoned explanations for what might be driving them.”

In the introduction to the book, Moss explains why it’s important for the general public to have a basic understanding of macroeconomics. The information is approachable to those coming into the study of economics as complete novices. It also could be a good refresher for those who learned a bit about economics in the past but want to get back into it. I knew very little about the subject, but careful reading of this book has given me a solid foundation for further independent study of macroeconomics.

A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics is organized into two parts. Part one covers the three basic pillars of macroeconomics: output, money, and expectations. Part two goes into more depth on each of these topics. So, if you want an even more concise guide to macroeconomics, you can simply read the first three chapters, a mere 85 pages in length.

If you're looking for a compendious introduction to macroeconomics for beginners, or if you want a refresher for terms and theories you struggled to learn back in your Econ 101 class in college, you’ve found the right book.

An Autobiography in Athens: Ancient and Modern.

How different my life would have been if COVID-19 instead had been COVID-16. I flew to Kunming, China to meet Eisel on February 14, 2017. If the pandemic had struck three years earlier, our internet-assisted love story would have been impossible. Of course, the way our love story unfolded was almost impossible as it was, but not quite. 

Just a few weeks before the closure of the borders on March 21st, we moved back to Victoria, BC. This is the longest period of time we've stayed in one place since we met each other. These past nine months have probably been the most stable of Eisel's adult life.

As the year comes to an end, the border remains closed, and the case count continues to rise in both the U.S. and Canada. While in lockdown, I've had a lot of time to reflect on the past. At this time last year, Eisel and I were in Athens together. We'd met up in Toronto on November 19th and one week later we were boarding a flight to Athens. As our time in Athens came to a close, I prepared to head back to my parents' house to continue my seven-month treatment of Isotretinoin (a.k.a. "Accutane") in a small town on the outskirts of Detroit, while Eisel prepared to return to Puli, a small town in central Taiwan.  

Traveling to Athens meant a lot to Eisel. In his youth, he'd been interested in learning Latin and Greek but considered it to be "out of reach," an endeavor open only to elite, private-school educated students. In his political science undergraduate degree, he'd been disappointed in every aspect of the quality of education at the University of Toronto, except for what he could learn on his own at the library, seeking out primary sources like Aristotle and Plato to teach himself what was lacking in the curriculum. He spent his twenties in Southeast Asia, independently studying Pali and bits and pieces of five other Asian languages while becoming a scholar of Theravada Buddhism. His interest in Ancient Greek philosophers may not have been at the forefront of his mind during those years, but, in his thirties, he read Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War as he cradled his infant daughter in his arms. 

Traveling to Athens meant a lot to me, too. I'd actually been to Athens before, when I was only nine years old, traveling with my family on a Mediterranean cruise. My maternal grandparents enjoyed traveling together in their retirement, and, as they got on in age, they took an interest in the more relaxed form of travel offered by cruise lines. After my grandfather passed away, my grandmother didn't travel as much as she used to. She was getting into her eighties, and my family thought it would be an adventurous "last hurrah" for her to cruise the Mediterranean with her children and grandchildren. 

Kenosha: Voices Only Heard Through Their Absence

There’s a book I’ve been meaning to read since my 27th birthday: I’ve carried it with with me around the world, from one desk to another. I’ve started and stopped, picked it up and put it down, and now it sits, still with only a few dozen pages read, on my shelf. The words Surviving Genocide glimmer slightly, in gold print, on the side of the dark purple tome—a tome that has spent more time beneath a stack of Chinese textbooks than it has on top. It is, however, an important book for me, in more ways than one.

Before the police shooting in Kenosha, I’d never heard the name of the city before, although, having grown up in Michigan, it neither sounded exotic nor faraway. And it wasn’t. I could identify it as an Ojibwe word: a remnant of a language I’d always seen scattered around the map of the Great Lakes.

My high school offered three foreign languages to choose from: Spanish, French, and German. One year my elementary school even offered after-school Japanese classes that I attended but can scarcely remember. Each of these languages led to a country, somewhere in the world, that I could visit one day: it was possible, at least in my mind’s eye, and it gave the study of the language a clear purpose. Study German, go to Germany. And I did just that: there was a high school trip organized so that we could live with a German family, practice the language with native speakers, and become, in some sense, more worldly.

There was an implicit problem in the lesson that we were all supposed to learn. In Spain, people speak Spanish. In France, people speak French. In Japan, people speak Japanese. But in America, people don’t speak “American.” We didn’t speak any American language, we spoke European languages: the difficulty of understanding, or even pronouncing, place names like Kenosha remained as the sole reminder of what was there before. Ojibwe used to be spoken where I grew up, yet I had no option to learn Ojibwe in school. I didn’t even know the language existed. Arriving at Detroit Metro Airport, there isn’t a single sign printed in any native language. You’ll see signs in English and Japanese, but not Ojibwe. As a child, I understood that Japanese was an important language; that is the main message that those signs declare. Although I wouldn’t have understood signs written in Ojibwe, I could have understood this much, if they had been there: that the language existed, that the language mattered, that it had something to do with us. I went to Germany to practice that language amongst Germans. Imagine if it were possible for a German to come to Detroit to learn Ojibwe, to see and hear it spoken amongst us.

Reflections on the Last Ten Years; or, Life Advice I Should Have Received at 17 Years Old.

It's now the first week of September 2020. I've been reflecting on the fact that ten years ago I moved into my dorm room and started my first semester at University of Michigan. It was my first time living “on my own” away from the home I grew up in, away from the surveillance of my parents, away from the comfortable trappings of a suburban life that I’d grown accustomed to.

I have a lot of qualms with the American education system. (I recommend reading a book entitled Academically Adrift for a more in-depth analysis on higher education in America.) Even at an elite university like University of Michigan, much of my “college experience” was not about learning or becoming a highly-educated person.

I have learned more in the past four years than I learned in my bachelor’s degree. I don’t fault the university system entirely—I could have and should have taken advantage of the resources available at my university. What I lacked was discipline and motivation, what I lacked was optimism and vision about the person I could become.

Reflecting on who I was at age 17, I remember that as I learned more, I became more and more disillusioned with my childish beliefs that things made sense, that there was a conclusion to every story, that there was a balance of good and evil in the world. I hated feeling lost and hopeless when confronted with the injustices and atrocities that had previously been hidden from me. Instead of getting positively motivated by this lack of knowledge and researching on my own to mitigate that lost and hopeless feeling, I retreated as much as I could to the childish worldview until it became intolerable. I was sick of feeling ignorant and living a self-indulgent life, but it was hard not to fall back into habits that were familiar yet self-destructive.

I decided to develop my ability to generate well-informed opinions about the issues we face in society, to expose what’s fact and what’s fiction, to devise solutions that could rectify what’s wrong with the world. As I learned more, what used to be mysterious and confusing became understandable with concentrated effort. I started to base my world view not on my feelings, not on religious dogma, not on any ideology or belief system. Over time I started to base my world view on historical reality. Each fragment of knowledge is like a puzzle piece to understanding why things are the way they are, and more often than not it leads me to re-evaluate things I thought I knew but had actually been misinformed about. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still don’t know.

In life, we can’t know the full range of consequences of our actions until after the fact. Having started college at 17 years old, sometimes I wish I could transport myself back in time and warn myself of all the pitfalls to avoid. I would tell myself that, although it’s seen as normal, college should not be treated as a prolonged adolescence. Starting now, you are no longer a child—you are an adult—and this is your chance to take responsibility for your actions. Adulthood means understanding the gravity of your decisions, your behaviors, and your habits. I would tell her that who you decide to let into your life is your choice, and you should choose wisely.

Now here I am, ten years older. I feel ten years wiser, but when I’m 37 years old I will probably look back and reflect on how stupid I was at age 27. I can’t know who I will be when I’m 37, but I worry about it every day because the terrifying and exciting reality is that the choices I make each day are what mold me into the person I become. I wonder how things would be different if, when I was 17, some mentor could have told me that there isn’t a soul deep down inside that determines who you are—that’s a childish notion, and it's time to grow up and come to terms with the fact that who you are is a conglomeration of all the choices you have made and continue to make. How you handle hardships is within your power alone, and every day you determine for yourself what you will do with the life you have chosen to lead. I imagine at age 37 that will still be a bitter pill to swallow. 

My reply to a netizen who asked me: "What makes you interested in Xinjiang?"

Terrorist Attacks/War on Terror.
How should a government fight terrorism? Which is worse: China’s response to the many terrorist attacks within China, or America’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks?


Presentation of Information in the Media.
How is it that western media sources condemn the Chinese government’s attempts at reeducating Uyghur Muslims as concentration camps while the Chinese media sources laud them as peaceful programs that provide Uyghur Muslims with practical career education (e.g., baking, mechanical work, administrative work) and Mandarin language education? Are both sides engaging in misinformation campaigns? Are there elements of truth to both sides?


Atheism/Anti-theism.
In recent history, the Communist Party of China has promoted state atheism and persecuted religious adherents. How is it that the Uyghur Muslims maintained their religion during a time when Buddhist temples and religious texts were destroyed?

As an atheist/nihilist/anti-theist, I question: is government-enforced secularism appropriate? If so, under what circumstances? Is living with the threat of terrorism due to religious extremism a circumstance under which it is appropriate for a government to resort to a policy of enforced secularism/religious persecution?


Indigenous Culture/Cultural Genocide.
Is Xinjiang an example of the Chinese government engaging in cultural genocide? China has praiseworthy policies in place to preserve ethnic diversity: indigenous minority languages and cultures are protected and celebrated. Are the oppressive religious elements of Uyghur Muslim culture worth preserving?


General Knowledge of World History/History of Islam.
Over 20% of the world’s population is Muslim. My education left me with many gaps in my knowledge of world history, and I learned next to nothing about Asia until I lived in China. Learning about of the spread of Islam is crucial to understanding the history of the last 1,500 years. Because of my interest in Chinese history, I’m especially interested in the effects of the spread of Islam within China and Central Asia.

AR&IO Chinese Course Episode 1