Steve has mentioned to me on a couple of occasions his surprise that the XBox Kinect hasn't had more hype about it compared to the Nintendo Wii upon its release; the reasoning, technologically, the XBox Kinect is more impressive with its body/voice recognition than the Nintendo Wii's Wiimote gestures. I agree it is. However, it's not surprising that the degree of hype isn't the same.
Blame it on jadedness with peripheral-based games or a glut of games following the "causal gamer" market. Whatever it is, expectations have changed since 2006 when the Wii was released. In 2006 there was an untapped market for gamers who were left behind the learning curve that kept growing long past the re-emergence of video games in the latter 80's. Nintendo had understood this from the shrinking video game market in Japan. Sony & Microsoft are just now playing catchup with this now-fully tapped market; along with numerous peripheral Wii games, portable console games, smartphone games, pointless money-making Facebook games, iPods/iPads app games, a plethora of [Your Musical Instrument Here] Hero& [Your Music Genre Here] Band games, the Playstation Move & XBox Kinect are now on top of a massive heap of battery/time sucking casual games.
Most casual games, from what I can see, aren't too much different from games that have been around long before '06. The graphics are prettier and there is a wider variety of different types of controls, but the fundamental mechanics of the games haven't changed that much. Casual games haven't done anything to push the limits of what we know as video games, it has rather just reiterated what has already been great about video games. To use the tired Hollywood analogy, they are mediocre 2nd-rate shows and movies; not anything awful but not anything spectacular either.
Innovation with video games will always take place with games aimed at the hardcore (or "core" as I've seen it recently) audience. Why? Because its these games that focus on the real meat of any video game, the gameplay. The audience is assumed to have a certain pre-existing knowledge of video-games and is apt to picking up new and different ways of playing video games. Thus the creators are free to experiment with new things;things that lead to innovation in video games.
As great as Nintendo Wii, XBox Kinect, & Playstation Move are, they will never supplant the core gamer's trusty friend, the controller. The reason for this is the controller allows for greater precision and less ambiguity between the gamer's intentions and his performing the mechanical action to follow his intentions. I think about this in terms of a less-used (but still abused) sports analogy; if a company produced a simple one golf-club that worked for any situation and allowed novices to get further distance than with a normal club, you'd never see professionals take to this club. Why? They wouldn't want to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity. A professional understands all the mechanics, variables, etc, in the game or sport he plays. Any value gained by easy of use would be sacrificed at the cost of loss of control.
In terms of video gameplay mechanics, many of these motion-based controllers do the same thing. Sure it's easier to realize how to do a punch or kick in a motion-based controller. But ultimately, some computer determines whether that motion you performed was a kick or punch. Computers are superior at making binary choices–either a button was pressed or it wasn't–when it comes to making fuzzy decisions (e.g. does the certain movement of the leg joints represent a kick) the results are not as good. Thus, motion-based controllers will always sacrifice accuracy at the cost of ease of use. The day motion-based controllers replace the standard videogame controller is the same day all sport referees are replaced with computers; it's not going to happen.
According to Micheal Gladwell in his book, Outliers, it takes 10,000 hours of work in a specific area to become an expert at it. If this is true, the amount of things you can become an expert in your life can be expressed by the following:
Sm = Hw x Yl x 365 / 10,000 Sm = Subjects mastered Hw = Average hours awake / day Yl = Years lived
Assuming that you're awake for an average of 16 hours /day, the math works out to
Sm = 0.584 x Yl
Put into English, you can master over half a subject in a given year if you've spent all your waking hours into it. Assuming you live 80 years, you could learn at most 46 different subjects.
Under a more realistic scenario of 8 hours / day and 60 years (lower than life expectancy but figuring in enfeebled years) lived:
Sm = 0.292 x Yl
Which means less than a 1/3 of a subject mastered in a given year with at most 17 different subjects in your lifetime.
Economics is an interesting science. For me, one of its appeals is its dual nature; it makes use of both sides of the brain. In some ways, it has elements of a hard science, mathematical models, empirical data, etc. However, at its core, it is a social science. We can see an example of this in the concept of value. It can be both intangible and tangible. The value of a human life is subjective. How can you place a value on thoughts, feelings, actions, and impact of a person's life? On the other hand, you can place a value on human life when it comes to things like insurance or wrongful death lawsuits. Economics tends stay focused more on hard data that can measured, but the intangible is unavoidable since it drives a lot of our actions and motivations. In some cases, there are economic terms for intangible value like goodwill.
I think one of the reasons why it's so hard for economists to definitely nail down a cause or effect of an economic problem; there are usually more than one ways at looking at the problem.
Is a company over valued in terms of the price of its stock? There are many different metrics on which to evaluate that answer. Things like P/E and PEG ratios try to analyze the price (or the growth there of) compared to the money it makes in a standardized way so it can be compared with other companies. On the other hand, there's a whole branch of study called Technical Analysis that tries to analyze pricing to charts based on the assumption there's some underlying pattern in how/when people buy/sell securities (think stocks, bonds, and other financial products).
What are the problems with the American economy? There's one way to look at the problems in terms of Macroeconomics. This the perspective that economists, central bankers, & politicians (may) look at. They look at broad data (like GDP and unemployment) and models of the economy to try to analyze the problem and take action upon those models. There's another way at looking at in terms of Microeconomics. This is the discipline of economics that the layman is most familiar with. It looks at things like supply, demand, costs, etc. This is the perspective that most of us look at as consumers and employees of businesses.
Trying to pull in all these economic disciplines and models, one thing is clear to me. They still don't make predicting economic effects or solving economic problems that much easier. Does that make them useless? No, from a historic perspective there's a lot of insight to be gained from economic models that can help us predict how the future may play out. However, no perfect economic model/theory/analysis exists. There's a few reason why.
First is accurately measuring data for the model. As much progress that has been made to accurately record economic metrics like the amount of spending, saving, unemployment, none of this information is 100% accurate; they are based on surveys & records. Sampling data is not the same as having a complete data set, which for something as large as a national economy is next to impossible to have.
Second is modeling decisions. I would argue, consciously or unconsciously, a person makes at least 10 economic decisions a day, and that's probably low considering all the possible unintentional economic decisions (e.g. I didn't take my wallet to the beach thus I didn't buy that bottle of water I wanted). At minimum that makes for 60 billion decisions a day to predict in a model. That's way too much for a model to predict.
Lastly, there's experimentation. The kinds of economic experiments that can happen in a controlled lab environment are limited and very few of those can experiment on the larger real world theories of macroeconomics; in those cases the best economists can do is look at historic economic data which can have various degrees of accuracy which they can then fit into their model.
Even if it you were able to keep track of every bit of economic information, model the decisions of every person accurately, & were able to perform any perfect simulated experiment, you still wouldn't have a perfect model of the economy. Why? Because the model wouldn't be sitting in a vacuum; any information gleaned from this model would be used by others looking to serve their own end. Whether that would be to reduce unemployment or to maximize their own return on the stock market, the model would have effectively changed the economic system it was modeling. Unless your model could model itself within the model, it's predictions would start to fall out of line with reality very quickly.
At best, you can say economic disciplines and models have provided us a charted some-what-inaccurate map where we've been and what the future could be like based on previous topography we've seen before. This isn't a failing of economics per se. Rather, it's more a statement about the impossibility of trying to predict the future. Some of these impossible-to-predict events can disrupt some of the solid assumptions in economic theories and models.
As I've been reading much about the current economic problems, present and future, two themes stick out at me: Technology and Demography. These two, very disruptive, themes have had an immense impact on the global, national, regional, & local economy, and it looks like they will continue to have such an impact into the not-so-easy-to-predict future.
Technology has obsoleted many businesses and simplified our lives. It has also had an unintended consequence, sucking many middle class/skill jobs out of the work place altogether. This has been made all the more evident with the recent recession. Phone support has been replaced by IVR or cheap outsourced developing economy labor. Movie rentals no longer need a manned brick and mortar store. Manufacturing has become automated and mechanized to great lengths.
Let's look at the spectrum of employment. On the low end there are many basic jobs that jobs that can't be outsourced, easily automated, or it's just cheaper to hire labor than to automate it. In the middle area, there are many jobs that require some specific education & knowledge but not as much as a professional career. They have either been outsourced to a labor market that's cheaper or they've been automated away from a person. They still exist but not to the same degree when this country was developing. On the high end, there are many jobs that require a long amount of education and are highly focused discipline. Many of these jobs exist but they take a long amount of time to acquire the skills necessary for them. This is a bit of a oversimplification, but in a global, highly technical economy many of middle skill workers in this country have been priced out of their jobs by machines or foreign labor.
Impact of Demography can be summarized by a simple phrase: an aging workforce. This can visualized by looking at population pyramids that represent the age groups. In the past, this has been a nice, ordered pyramid, having a wide base with a narrowing top. As we've progressed into the modern age, 2 effects have changed the distribution of the pyramid; technology and modern medicine has enabled the top of the pyramid to widen out as people live longer; as economy has gone through modernization and birth rates have fallen, the base of the pyramid has shrank.
These are 2 good effects; people get to live their lives easier and longer; populations have naturally slowed their growth preventing some sort of Malthusian catastrophe. However, this has also produced 2 very worrying disruptive effects about the future.
The first hovers around something called the dependency ratio. This can be thought of as the ratio between children and elders compared to middle aged adults. For things like child assistance and social security this number is vital; it represents how many people are paying into a social system versus how many are cashing out. The smaller this number gets the less that can be paid out to the young and old.
The second hovers around something called the replacement rate. This is the fertility rate needed for a static population. This number is around 2.1 for many industrialized countries but varies based on mortality. If the fertility rate is below this number, the population is shrinking. If it is above this number, the population is growing. A growing/shrinking population has many evident effects for economy. All things being equal, an economy should grow/shrink with its population of people.
Coming back to the population pyramid, we can that these 2 effects have widen the top of the pyramid, and for shrinking populations made it top heavy. Many industrialized countries, including our own, are seeing this effect take place right now. Luckily for us, net immigration helps keep us above the replacement ratio. Many European countries are falling below this ratio. Japan at a rate of 1.3, has been shrinking for a few years. If this continues long enough, it's easy to see how the economy, and more worryingly society, could decay altogether.
Both of these themes put together, spell out trouble times ahead. I think, more than anything else, this has very troubling consequences toward inequality in this economy. Income inequality has been rising for quite some time. A concentration of inequality when it comes to job availability, and between those who are giving versus receiving from social welfare, can only exasperate the trend. Looking at all the data, it can really depress your outlook on the future.
Wow what a great piece Shawn. I have a degree in Economics. You are 100% correct economics as a study relies far too much on the tangible. Western policies have worshiped Ricardian Economics to establish the global economy we have today, while ignoring the intangible aspects of these policies. I love that Capitalist societies seek out efficiency in new economies without regard for the effect on their own society, but it can be suicidal. The United States relies on other societies for production of goods and even services at the expense of both societies. (I sound like a crazy hippy) I have no idea how to fix it without some sort of protectionism which is a cardinal sin in Economics.
Awesome! I'm glad you liked it. Economics has been a pet interest of mine for a few years ever since I got into the stock market. I can't say I know that much outside of reading handful of books, the Economist, & daily information on the stock market.
I think there's a lot of externalities that have yet to come to due as the result of both Wall St's growth fetishism & the government's short-term thinking (i.e. only concerned insofar as the next election cycle). There are some really big issues that need some thoughtful decisive action taken for the next few decades. Meanwhile, the political debate for many people (i.e. what they see on TV) hasn't reached much beyond the intellectual depth of professional wrestling.
As far as solutions, I'm stumped too. Economics seems to be a much better history teacher than problem solver. The big comparisons thrown around are the Great Depression (the effects Smoot–Hawley pretty much puts the final nail in the protectionism coffin) & post-90's-bubble Japan. If I had to pick one, Japan seems the most apt. However, our society is very different from Japan. The world is going through unprecedented times, Economics provides insight but probably won't have any clear answers for awhile.
Why does everyone say "fail"? That's so fucking gay!-A Concerned citizen
I've been thinking about the fail Internet meme recently. In the past couple of years it has hit a critical mass; you can find it in all kinds of mass media and people's conversations. A friend of mine, new to social media over the net, found the meme's pervasiveness troubling (articulated by the quote above). I was curious about its origins so I embarked on quest for knowledge.
Wikipedia is usually a good starting point, so I went there. Sure enough, you can find an article about failure. Past academic sub topics about failure (what defines failure, taxonomies of failure, etc.), you get to the Internet meme. Demonstrating it's common form of "fail" and "epic fail", the sub topic brings up it's origin possibly rooted as a shortened form of "You fail it", a engrish phrase taken from a Neo Geo game called Blazing Star made in 1998.
For those aren't familiar with it, like I was, here's a clip from the game with the phrase:
Questioning the Origin
Something about this strikes me as wrong. I'm not exactly sure what but there are a few things that seem off this statement. I think I'm pretty well knowledged in both video game and Internet subculture. I wasn't even aware of Blazing Star until I read this article. It's not that I don't believe Blazing Star is the possible origin—the world of video games and the Internet is a big place—I'm just skeptical.
Looking at the citations for this statement, we have 3 sources:
For the sake of my research, I disregarded 3 as it is mostly commentary that cited 1. Both 1 and 2 are good articles. They're mostly about the state of the meme as it is today. As far as the origin goes, both offer only a paragraph of material. 1, citing a 2003 Doomworld forum post from 2003, suggests Blazing Star's "You Fail It" as a possible origin. 2 suggests this too with out a source. I noted that this article was a year younger than 1 so it could have been its source (see the Fail Timeline below). 2 also cites UrbanDictionary, an informal source of neologisms, in trying to date the meme's origin to as early as July 2003.
I have a problem with these 2 cited pieces evidence. First is the DoomWorld forum post. While the post does indeed mention Blazing Star, it's only in the context of the forum post's proposed question: where does "All your base..." and "You fail it" originate from? Never mentioned is fail in the context as it's used today. Second is the link to the "fail" entry on UrbanDictionary. If you take a look at the "fail" entry on UrbanDictionary, you can see the first post was dated on 7/22/03 and has subsequently generated 89 definitions, none of which reference Blazing Star. However, if you look at the UrbanDictionary entry on "you fail it" you'll see the first post was dated 10/1/2003 and has since generated on 2 entries, one of which mentions Blazing Star.
While hardly an authoritative source, UrbanDictionary is still useful as a zeitgeist of slang usage. The timeline and consistency of these 2 UrbanDictionary entries calls into question the theory that "you fail it" is the origin of the meme . If "fail" originated from "you fail it", why was the "fail" entry started 3 months before "you fail it"? Also, why has the "fail" entry generated so many more definitions as opposed to "you fail it"? Sure you'd expect "fail", with the critical mass it has now, to have many more user definitions, but wouldn't you expect "you fail it" to have generated at least a few more definitions as the meme transformed into just "fail"?
This doesn't surprise me. The Neo Geo came out in 1990. Technically superior to its contemporaries, the Nintendo SNES and Sega Genesis, it came with a cost of $650. Adjusted for inflation, that's over $1000 for a video game console. Some games, according to the Wikipedia article, were priced over $200. Needless to say, this wasn't a mass market gaming console. Some 8 years later when Blazing Star came out, the potential audience couldn't have been that big. Good luck even trying to find a copy of it out there to buy.
Today, thanks to wonders of modern technology we have a cornucopia of fail planes, trains, and automobiles (don't forget the boats!), not to mention the countless failure motivational posters. But despite it being the supposed progenitor of fail, there is an absolute dearth of "you fail it" images; all you can expect to find are random images, various aforementioned fail images , or, Blazing Star screen captures; everything but images with the "you fail it" text. Again, I wouldn't expect to see the same volume as "fail" images, but you'd think there would be some images.
Given what we know so far, the story of the fail meme follows something like this. In 1998 a game comes out for a what-would-now-be $1000 game console. Being on a niche console, a few copies might of made its way to the US. It has some bad Engrish on one of it's finish screens. At least 4-5 years later in 2003, around the same time as "All your base..." it gets mentioned on Internet forums and is laughed at by a group of people who are certainly larger that any group that could have originally played the game. Another 3-4 years pass, it has now hit a critical mass with images everywhere on the Internet; large fails are now called epic; large media publications such as the NYT write about the meme.
How Memes Grow
Something is really wrong with this story. There are too many gaps and the popularity growth of the meme just doesn't fit Blazing Star's obscurity. Borrowing from the Wikipedia entry, memes are units of cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. For a meme to flourish, it has to be easily transmitted from person to person. A common language and set of experiences between 2 people is needed for transmitting a meme. For many Internet memes, this facilitated through a reference to a video, song, game, or other piece of media that both people are familiar with.
For example, say I'm talking with friends when my cell phone rings. I receive a call informing me that I won a large sum of money. Hanging up my phone, I exclaim, "Everything's coming up Shawn!" My friends, or at least ones who watch The Simpsons, might remember this and laugh:
The meme "Everything's coming up _____!" has just been created. It has been transferred easily to the people who remember the particular episode of The Simpsons. Some people may ask where that phrase came from. Some people might make the same joke later to other people and thus the meme will spread. My point here is the more common the experience that the meme is based on, the more likely it will spread. An episode of The Simpsons is watched by millions of people. A meme based on The Simpsons will spread quicker than, say an early 90's sidescrolling video game with bad Engrish cut scenes.
The Internet does help speed the transmission and broadcast of a meme, but that common experience still needs to exist in order for it to transfer to person to person. Take a good example, a LOLCat. Back around 2006ish, someone found a rather silly cat picture on the Internet taken from a Russian cat food company.
Someone decides to throw some text on it describing the cat's, now known as happy cat, thoughts.
Many people laugh; comedy gold is discovered. Take a picture of a cat in some silly situation, place a label describing the cat's thoughts in it, and now you have a recipe for a meme plated with 24 carats of comedic gold. The meme spreads and a endless number of variations on the original meme take place.
The LOLCat meme has spread so vastly thanks to a couple of very common experiences.
Almost everyone has seen their pet cat doing something silly.
Many people assign their cats human-like thoughts and personalities.
All that's needed is modern technology for the meme to spread: digital cameras, Photoshop, and the Internet.
A Failure to Communicate
Coming back from the digression into what makes a meme transfer between people, I come back to the question: how could Blazing Star be the origin of the fail meme. Given that "you fail it" is an obscure reference to an expensive game console game that had limited release, how did it spread so quickly from person to person? If "fail" came from "you fail it" why are there no traces of its transformation in the same manner of the LOLCat meme? Based on the evidence I've seen, "you fail it" has no real solid connection to "fail", "failure", or "epic fail". Both have the word "fail" in them, both seem to have popped up around the same time on the Internet, both seem to be cut from the same Engrish cloth, but that's where the connections end.
My theory lies in another game. Back in 1999, less than a year after Blazing Star was released, Nintendo released Super Smash Brothers for the N64 around the world. In the single player version of the game, you encounter a break-the-targets mini game level. In the mini game, you have to hop around, platform to platform, to break targets before a timer runs out. If you fail to break all the targets, you are presented with this from the announcer:
FAILURE. Note even the emphasis that the announcer places on FAIL. Sounds pretty close to the failure meme doesn't it? You attempt to break the targets, you screw up, FAILURE. A simple logical conclusion stated ever so boldly by the announcer: FAILURE.
While Blazing Star remained in obscurity, Super Smash Brothers would go on to be a smash hit, selling almost 5 million copies. The popular 4-player battle mode enabled by the N64's 4 controller ports (a innovative feature at the time) created many fans of the game. 2 years later, Nintendo would release a sequel, Super Smash Brothers Melee for the GameCube. Like its predecessor, it sports the same break-the-targets mini game, and the same announcement for failing to do so:
Super Smash Brothers Melee would go on to sell over 7 million copies. The seeds of a meme were sown. Millions of young kids, teenagers, and young adults played this game. The many that played the single player mode were presented with a common experience. You have a set goal of breaking the targets, if fail to do so: FAILURE; that can be applied in many places in life. Many years after the release of the game, it was still popular for its multiplayer battle mode.
At this point this is where things get hazy. Pinpointing where the fail meme started showing up on the Internet is tricky. Without direct historical evidence of people explicitly saying where they got the "fail" meme from, we'll probably be left guessing. There's just no easy way to narrow down the search for this. As more and more people started using the Internet in the early-mid 00's, some where, some one, labeled something as "fail" and it took off. In the last 2-3 years, I would say it has hit a critical mass. The phrase "epic fail" has been coined. I now hear it in conversations. People not even familiar with the original source use the fail meme.
Social media provides more evidence of Smash Brothers being the origin of the fail meme. Try searching FaceBook. The FaceBook fan page of Blazing Star has 16 fans. Of the many Smash Brothers fan pages, one page has over 9000 fans! Even more pertinent, there's fan page for the announcer saying FAILURE that has almost 10 times the number of fans as Blazing Star.
Smash Brothers is still popular to this day. 2 years ago Nintendo released Super Smash Brothers Brawl for the Wii. It has sold almost 10 million copies and is the 8th best selling Wii game. Again, sporting the same mini game and, of course, an announcer eager to claim failure when he sees it:
And for my German readers:
I don't think this definitively proves it, but this is pretty strong evidence for Smash Brothers being the source of the fail meme. Being that there's no clear link between the transformation between "you fail it" and "fail", it makes much more sense that a game experienced by millions, stating explicitly the key word FAILURE, would be the common experience that fuel the transmission of the meme.
It's hard to say whether I'll be vindicated. But if I am, you heard it here first.
Fail Timeline
2/19/98: Blazing Star is released on the Neo Geo.
1/21/99: Super Smash Brothers is released for the N64.
11/21/01: Super Smash Brothers Melee is released for the GameCube.
7/18/03: DoomWorld Forum User Ichor sites Blazing Star as the origin of "You Fail It" later to be cited in "Epic Win".
7/22/03: The term "fail" is posted to the Urban Dictionary later to be cited by "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection".
10/01/03: The term "you fail it" is posted to the Urban Dictionary.
9/15/06: The term "epic fail" is posted to the Urban Dictionary.
1/31/08: Super Smash Brothers Brawl is released on the Wii.
5/5/08: The fail Internet meme is added to the Wikipedia article on failure.
10/15/08: Slate publishes "Epic Win".
10/17/08: The Guardian blogs about "Epic Win".
10/24/08: KnowYourMeme publish a video about fail.
8/7/09: NYT publishes "How Fail Went From Verb to Interjection".
I'm glad you like it! I don't know how many people read this thing these days so it's good to hear that someone is enjoying reading it as much as I like writing it.
Yeah, very lucky. It was plenty of trouble getting my parents to buy one for me. I had to save over the whole summer to purchase Chrono Trigger for $80 when it first was released.
First of all, I want to applaud you for being one of the more optimistic researchers of this term and not just another person who believes everything wikipedia tells them. You are correct in many, many ways.
The term FAIL was coined by the cupo clan from the original counter-strike and quake 3 arena gaming era. It did not come from no Blazing Star game. "You fail it" and "FAIL", have absolutely no correlation, and FAIL was not derived from Blazing Star. (I assure you, I was there between 1998 and 2003 and no one was saying FAIL this, FAIL that. Infact, the gaming community at that point in history knew only to take games seriously and it is highly doubted that anyone who played Blazing Star would have had the audacity to act that immature. Blazing Star is a tryhard game that is not really one to goof off in. Futhermore, the game Blazing Star is actually translated very well to english, infact it is quite americanized.) However, the inspiration for the usage of FAIL throughout the quake community and the Half-life 1 community stemmed from the original Super Smash Bros for the Nintendo 64 in the "Break the target" challenge mode where if you fall off the map before breaking all the targets, the screen reads "FAILURE" and you pretty much feel shit out of luck. It started out as a tease towards teammates who "FAILed" to win the round for their team during moments of pressure. A real life example of how the term might be used would be trying to make the game winning shot in a basketball game at the sound of the buzzer, but fail. At that time, people would normally encourage that player with a "nice try!" or a "almost won it!" but twas the griefer who rubbed it in. No credit was given to the cupo clan due to their involvement in "Video game griefing" since the early Quake 1 days on Mplayer.
Epic fail is just a spin-off of FAIL that was created by some WoW players.
The term ''tryhard'' also originated in the Quake III Arena and Counter-strike communities. (which makes sense)
I love reading. Being so ubiquitous, we take it for granted how useful it is. For English, all we need is less than 40 distinct written symbols for us to convey practically every thought imaginable. We can express our thoughts and feelings, communicate events, describe how our world works just with abstract symbols. Even with all stuff mankind has created, the written language is still one of its top inventions; without it most other great inventions aren't possible.All this shit should be obvious to anyone reading it, but it's worth repeating. Reading is fundamental to any sort of higher learning regardless of topic.
Immersion into a different world of thoughts and experiences is how I look at reading. Regardless whether the material is a novel, news, a discussion of economics, computer code, text messages, or a facebook post, writing allows you to understand a person's thoughts and insights. Over enough words, you will start to understand not just thoughts but the thought processes that create the words in the first place.
That's where the learning happens. Deeply engrossed in reading, temporarily disassociated with what's going on around you, you're able to not only read and understand the words but also imagine what is being read. Being able to visualize what I'm reading is strong indicator that I'm learning something or at least the information is compelling. If that isn't happening, either the information isn't interesting or there's something I'm missing. That's a important detail I try to remind myself, especially when I'm wanting to understand something. Sometimes that takes discipline and focus, but that is the essence of understanding practically anything when it comes to reading. Although, Quantum Mechanics still throws me for loop when I try to fully understand it.
Wow what a great piece Shawn. I have a degree in Economics. You are 100% correct economics as a study relies far too much on the tangible. Western policies have worshiped Ricardian Economics to establish the global economy we have today, while ignoring the intangible aspects of these policies. I love that Capitalist societies seek out efficiency in new economies without regard for the effect on their own society, but it can be suicidal. The United States relies on other societies for production of goods and even services at the expense of both societies. (I sound like a crazy hippy) I have no idea how to fix it without some sort of protectionism which is a cardinal sin in Economics.