Perspicuity

You can probably tell from my last post that I am re-reading Tolkien. Actually I am listening to the unabridged audio collection of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. It is slow, with over 60 hours of audio, but well worth it.

I am also in a 'longer-term' effort to re-'read' Adam Smith. While my alma mater required only one chapter of Smith's work, I feel some unwritten obligation to slog my way through the entire work. I knocked down book one, but have yet to work up the energy to start the next one. Maybe I will do one a per year.

Smith inspired the name of this weblog, Perspicuity. Here's the quote from Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved February 6, 2003 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN1.html.

"I shall endeavour to explain, as fully and distinctly as I can, those three subjects in the three following chapters, for which I must very earnestly entreat both the patience and attention of the reader: his patience, in order to examine a detail which may, perhaps, in some places, appear unnecessarily tedious; and his attention, in order to understand what may perhaps, after the fullest explication which I am capable of giving it, appear still in some degree obscure. I am always willing to run some hazard of being tedious, in order to be sure that I am perspicuous; and, after taking the utmost pains that I can to be perspicuous, some obscurity may still appear to remain upon a subject, in its own nature extremely abstracted."

From ?An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations? by Adam Smith
Book I: Chapter IV ?Of the Origin and Use of Money?: Final Paragraph

From YourDictionary.com: per·spic·u·ous: (pr-spky-s) adj. Clearly expressed or presented; easy to understand.

This weblog is devoted to my part in battle between perspicuity and tedium that takes places in every economics classroom.