The Times: Countries, Society, and Individuals Under Cyclical Fluctuations
XiaoLin is one of my favorite uploaders. Beautiful, top student, Wall Street investment banking, startup founder. All kinds of eye-catching labels. And her videos are genuinely high quality: well produced, while still easy to understand. I read her book partly to support her. The content of the whole book, to be honest, is basically all covered in her videos, and in many cases the videos explain it even better. After all, videos make it much easier to show charts and diagrams. So actually, even if you do not read this book, just watching her YouTube or Bilibili videos is probably enough. The most magical thing about reading this book is that it comes with a built-in voice feature. I have to marvel at how powerful the human brain is: while reading, XiaoLin’s voice and videos automatically start playing in my head. It was a pretty nice experience. It also worked as a review of the knowledge she had talked about in earlier videos.
Still, I do want to emphasize one point. XiaoLin’s videos and books are all popular-science oriented. Although there is quite a bit of solid macroeconomics content, the overall tone is still light and entertainment-oriented. Even though she supports the arguments with many papers and data points, the explanations can still feel quite shallow, and many causal relationships are not necessarily as straightforward as her analysis presents them. After all, economics is an extremely complex discipline. Many times people are using the rear-view mirror to look for causes, rather than using the present to predict the future. Friends who trade stocks or follow the economy should all have this feeling. Every analyst gives a different analysis, and nobody states things too absolutely. Then half a year later, when reality turns out to be very different from the original analysis, they can still make the story sound internally consistent. I also follow a few investment uploaders myself, but I will not name or recommend them here, so that I do not mislead anyone.