About Brian
Brian Chang is the author and editor of Crusoe Economics and has been writing on finance, markets, investing, and economics since 2001. He is a contributing author to the nationally-distributed investing and finance magazine Canadian MoneySaver, and the former author of the investment blog The Lonely Trade Investment Report.
Brian holds a degree in Computer Science and has a background in Software Engineering and Project Management. He is an independent non-affiliated investor currently residing in Vancouver BC, Canada.
Crusoe Economics
Crusoe Economics is the personal blog of Brian Chang, originally created as a platform to provide commentary and analysis in the areas of economics, capital markets, and investing.
The title of this blog Crusoe Economics refers to the oft-used analytical framework employed by economists to reduce complex market concepts down to basic first principals. As originally envisioned, it examines a hypothetical Robinson Crusoe stranded on a desert island with only a single servant as his companion. The analysis distills the complexities of a modern economy down to basic elementary truths, emulating a simple closed economic system with only two individuals under conditions of resource scarcity.
While originally created as an educational tool for the teaching of core economic principals to the uninitiated, it has today become a euphemism for the debunking of popularized economic fallacies and a rebuttal to the increasingly pervasive and misguided policies of modern-day governments. In today’s new world of “muddle-through” economics where policy-makers bounce unwittingly from one failed policy experiment to the next, such frameworks are now more necessary than ever.
Elementary illustrations like this are sometimes ridiculed as Crusoe Economics. Unfortunately, they are ridiculed most by those who most need them, who fail to understand the particular principle illustrated even in this simple form, or who lose track of that principle completely when they come to examine the bewildering complications of a great modern economic society. – Henry Hazlitt