Welcome to the page!

Hi there!

Let me start by expressing my gratitude that you, dear reader, took the time to check out this page. Hopefully I'm able to live up to your expectations. First off, check out the 'about' page for a short introduction to the page. As a historian, and economist in the making, I'm naturally particularly interested in those fields. For now, the interests merged into five main strings my attention for this page goes into. My first goals with my writings on this website is to make complicated (sometimes even a little boring) stuff, more accessible for anyone to read, by making above topics way more entertaining to read with living metaphors. Secondly, history is in my opinion the best cheat sheet we have at our disposal. I'd like to occasionally write parts about people in history I admire, or otherwise have expressed compelling ideas in the past. The third part is books (non-fiction). Reading is key to adsorbing all the experiences and thoughts the great minds of our time and previous times have put into our world, and summaries would perhaps persuade you into reading the book itself. Fourthly, all the way from history and concepts, we go to the hysteria of contemporary news and opinion making, lacking the much needed nuance and background information. Embed and check the news in relation to academic research would be a great first step. Last but not least, I provide a (Dutch) summary of a weekly podcast I'm doing with a couple of friends. Here's a couple of examples you could expect in the coming months.

'A short introduction into'-series

As said above, many topics regarding economics and history are bloated, and it would take many hours - if not days or weeks - of reading to get a grasp of the concepts at hand. This series is to make these topics a little easier to digest. Examples are 'short introductions into': Money, inflation, labourmarkets, personal household finances, government spending, taxes, wealth and income, housing markets, technology, globalization, institutions, etc.

The Great of History

Our books are filled with the examples of great men and women of the past, their ideas and accomplishments, their lessons for the 21st century. Let's bring them back into the light. From John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx, Margaret Hamilton to Seneca, and Michel Foucault to Hugo Grotius.

Contemporary comments

Discussions on the news and on your birthday parties come and go. Do we just parrot the opinions of others, or are we also looking at what the data actually states on the topic? Think of political issues such as minimum wage, interest rates, immigration, anything we could nuance with research.

Books

A personal goal of myself is to read more, apart from what already has to be done for study itself. There are countless of amazing reads out there, waiting to illuminate someones thoughts to bring improvements into our worlds. The posts will include the introduction of the context of the author and Zeitgeist, summarizing the useful 'diamonds' for the hassles of the 21st century, and concluding with a review/opinion. Examples are the range of books written by the 'grand economists' such as Keynes, Friedman, Hayek, Smith, and Raworth, but also including the well-read books from the last years from the likes of Harari.

Podcast (Dutch)

For our Dutch readers, every week a post will be published summarizing the last podcast.

Warm regards and happy reading,

Jan van Rijnbach