Apologies for the lack of updates. I created this blog with the intent of providing quality articles rather than short blog posts, however with my final months at college I've been struggling to find the time to do this. I would love to post some of the work I've been doing in economics over the past two years, but with concerns over plagiarism this will have to wait at least until the summer when this is less of a worry and I have the time to edit my portfolio so it is suitable for online.
Economics has been a fantastic subject and I cannot wait to do it at university. I must admit, I took a bit of a gamble taking economics having no experience beforehand, but I've never regretted the decision. Completing my portfolio was sometimes painful (the word count is horrifically short at 650-750 words per piece of work), but it has been really fascinating following news stories I wouldn't otherwise consider, and with an international focus and approach. Before I would never even glance at news like the Chevron-Ecuador dispute (see Time's article for a recent update), but I'm glad I do now since the dispute has been such an interesting story in the fact that neither party will give in. The story just keeps going! And the responsibility of who should correct the market failure is a difficult one to evaluate: do you go from an economic perspective, an environmental perspective or a purely legal one?
As for my classes, I couldn't have studied International Economics at a more interesting time. The euro crisis has provided a perfect backdrop to our work on balance of payments and exchange rates, and it also has me pumped for PPE. One of the problems I often come across in my essays is that they occasionally turn political in the evaluation, and having to restrain myself to just economics is extremely difficult for me when writing about euro crisis. I want to find the underlying political and philosophical issues in the problems of sovereignty, debt and complete integration; it would be heaven if I could just add it to what I already know in economics!
So, what can be expected for the future of this blog? Not much, at least until my exams are over in May. However, I should be spending a month in Saudi afterwards, so expect lots of coverage of my desert adventures then! I will also take a long-needed update on my evaluation of the environmental crime and conflict in the DR Congo, something that I had worked on for a model United Nations last year and had wanted to turn into a research article for this site (to add to what I've learnt from various books since last year). And maybe, just maybe, I'll get round to my impressions of my holiday in Jordan last November.
Just maybe. If I'm nice.
Showing posts with label PPE. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PPE. Show all posts
Monday, January 09, 2012
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Beginning New Ends
I have one more year left of living in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
All going well, in a year's time I'll be at university, studying for a degree that will hopefully lead on to a career in journalism. My ideal degree (though not necessarily the one I will end up in) is Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I feel its principles are in almost all areas of the media today, and as I look further it seems that the decisions we and those around us make are governed by the social, political and economic aspects of society.
Whether we like this or not is immaterial. But having an awareness of how these principles affect our lives means we have the ability to change them. We are not made to be cogs in a machine. We have our rights and our responsibilities, and as members of our local communities and citizens of our countries we should adhere to both. For a long time, my parents have been emphasising the need for the recognition of both rights and responsibilities; freedom does not lie in the Land of Do-As-You-Please. People (and when I say people, of course I am making a generalisation) are quick to spout the phrase "It's my right!" but very rarely do I hear the words "It's my responsibility!".
So yes, I've started to take an active interest in freedom. Political freedom, economic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of thought. This issue of freedom first struck me whilst reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and has stayed at the back of my mind ever since. I consider myself to be 'free' and not in spite of the laws, rules and codes of practice that I have to abide to, but in part because of them. If freedom is made up of rights and responsibilities, then following these regulations whilst retaining my rights grants me freedom.
Of course, it is never as simple as that. Read anything about the DR Congo in the past twenty years and you'll see personal liberties stripped away like confetti. Do they have freedom?
Then there's the issue of religion and spiritual freedom, a matter which is so large in itself that I have no plan in the immediate future to venture into!
Finally we have Saudi, a country which I have so much to learn from, and so much to learn about. There are many misconceptions about Saudi, but as the spotlight draws ever closer to the country in this age of oil, what is fact and what is fiction needs be cleared up. Western misconceptions here are popular thought in the States, or in the UK.
So I hope you find this blog interesting. Intriguing. Entertaining. Or, at the very least, not a waste of your time.
All going well, in a year's time I'll be at university, studying for a degree that will hopefully lead on to a career in journalism. My ideal degree (though not necessarily the one I will end up in) is Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I feel its principles are in almost all areas of the media today, and as I look further it seems that the decisions we and those around us make are governed by the social, political and economic aspects of society.
Whether we like this or not is immaterial. But having an awareness of how these principles affect our lives means we have the ability to change them. We are not made to be cogs in a machine. We have our rights and our responsibilities, and as members of our local communities and citizens of our countries we should adhere to both. For a long time, my parents have been emphasising the need for the recognition of both rights and responsibilities; freedom does not lie in the Land of Do-As-You-Please. People (and when I say people, of course I am making a generalisation) are quick to spout the phrase "It's my right!" but very rarely do I hear the words "It's my responsibility!".
So yes, I've started to take an active interest in freedom. Political freedom, economic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of thought. This issue of freedom first struck me whilst reading George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and has stayed at the back of my mind ever since. I consider myself to be 'free' and not in spite of the laws, rules and codes of practice that I have to abide to, but in part because of them. If freedom is made up of rights and responsibilities, then following these regulations whilst retaining my rights grants me freedom.
Of course, it is never as simple as that. Read anything about the DR Congo in the past twenty years and you'll see personal liberties stripped away like confetti. Do they have freedom?
Then there's the issue of religion and spiritual freedom, a matter which is so large in itself that I have no plan in the immediate future to venture into!
Finally we have Saudi, a country which I have so much to learn from, and so much to learn about. There are many misconceptions about Saudi, but as the spotlight draws ever closer to the country in this age of oil, what is fact and what is fiction needs be cleared up. Western misconceptions here are popular thought in the States, or in the UK.
So I hope you find this blog interesting. Intriguing. Entertaining. Or, at the very least, not a waste of your time.
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