After the 3 month long delay, my first issue of The Economist finally arrived last week. I can’t really blame the company, I got a darn good price for the subcription, they probably want to check my identity as a student first. I quickly read through the first few articles and got quite bored with it. Actually it isn’t boredom, but you can’t possibly expect my attention span on such an academic magazine to be that long. I did not forcefully compel myself to finish it, and hence, I ended reading just half of the whole issue. The main focus last week was about oil. There isn’t really very much to elaborate about oil other than its price, Saudi, and Bush. It appeared to be an extremely eurocentric magazine with some stuff about Asia here and there.
So before I manage to finish that issue, a new issue arrived – once it starts coming, it begins to stream in weekly – this time the focus is not Australia. From Bill Bryson’s ‘Down Under’ I learn lots of stuff about Australia. I also discovered how much the world has forgotten them. This issue of The Economist is probably a breakthrough after these months since 2005 began.
For such an old publication, I expected more attempts to try catch up with times and hence a little more pictures but unfortunately, they seem as traditional as ever. Even the advertisements are mostly text-based. They’re probably the biggest European Google supporters. Nonetheless, the articles are solid and definitely full of content, which explains why the publication manages to live till today. Initially, I was quite biased against this publication mainly because its name makes it sound like a old radio churning highly technical information that has jargon all over it – I was wrong; secondly, it is because Edwin Tan always tries to show off how much he knows about terrestrial stuff by copying the articles from The Economist and pasting them on his blog. Don’t worry, I won’t do what he does.
I am not that much of an economic kind of person (I am more of the economical kind), though I very much don’t mind being one. I am rather facinated by how complex this whole thing is. It is almost natural arising, it took a combination of circumstances and human brain-work to complete its infrastructure. It is more amazing than the world’s every super computer combined. In fact, it is built by a collection of super-computers, and super-intelligent human minds. Most importantly, every political engine is dependant on this stable collective power to operate and function smoothly.