Oh, Christmas Tree

I'm not anti-government. In fact, I teach an entire course about how the careful application of government to certain problems can make the world a richer place. But I do believe that government needs to establish priorities, and needs to be thoughtful about what it chooses to dip its fingers into.

Case in point: the Christmas tree tax. This 15-cent per tree fee would be collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and would be used to fund a promotional campaign for Christmas trees along the lines of dairy's "Got Milk?" campaign.

Any economist worth his flocking can go on and on about the economic effects of the Christmas tree tax. So here, I offer only a few brief thoughts. The first: It seems ironic to believe that taxing Christmas trees will help sell more Christmas trees.

Second: Seriously? All the troubles we have in this country, and you're spending our hard-earned tax dollars to develop and implement a go-nowhere program like this? Where on Earth is your sense of priority?

Finally: A promotional campaign for Christmas trees? Do they really need help? After all, it's not broccoli we're talking about.

I believe . . .

that dislike for a particular group of people is a poor foundation for public policy.

Why economists don't get invited to many parties . . .

It's a wonderful life. But a more wonderful painting.

At least

the Tea Partiers tell the truth. They want lower taxes and smaller government, and they'll tell you that, even if it makes them look cruel.

I want the Dems to tall the truth, too. I want them to stop saying that the super-rich "don't pay their fair share," and to start saying, "We want a lot of stuff. And we can't afford or are unwilling to pay for that stuff ourselves. So we're going to make you pay for it for us."

At least it'd be honest.

Just because . . .

I'll never be a top two-percenter doesn't entitle me to be disrespectful of those that are.

A nation . . .

can no more tax itself into prosperity than can a fat man eat himself into thinness.

Motivation

So I'm having a tough time getting back to writing, which I suspect is an illness that lots of writers find themselves afflicted with from time to time. For me, it's not just that I'm not putting words on the page, it's that I'm breaking a commitment that I've made to myself that I'm going to see this project (actually, these projects) through to completion.

The problem is that nobody has really put me on a deadline, so in the evenings, when I do my best writing, it's all too easy to call up an episode of Columbo (did you know they last for almost two hours?) and open a frothy amber beverage instead of doing what I've told myself I'm going to do.

In the past, when I've reached the point where I ignore self-imposed deadlines, I've found it helpful to call in a neutral enforcer. And of those neutral enforcers, none has been more effective than a website organized by a couple of economists, stickk.com

The premise is simple: you go to stickk.com and register a commitment that you've made to yourself. They take your credit card number, and if you and a neutral third party fail to report that you've met your commitment, the website bills your credit card for an amount you predetermined, and transfers those funds to the charity of your choosing.

Of course, if you pick a charity you appreciate, it might be tough to keep your commitment. "Well, looks like I won't get this book chapter written, but at least the money I posted is saving starving children in Lower Volga." So Stickk.com gives you the option of choosing an anti-charity, a charity you despise, instead. "Damn, I'd better drop those last few pounds or the Humans For Clubbing Cute Baby Seals Society will get my $50 donation. We can't have that, can we?"

So today, I'm making a commitment to myself, with stickk.com as the enforcer: a major revision to the first chapter of my book, and a draft of another chapter, by the time the clock strikes midnight on the last day of September.

Can I get a second opinion?

This fall, I'm using a first draft of my book manuscript in my Economic Analysis of Social Issues course. I have asked my students to carefully proofread it for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and am rewarding them for finding mistakes.

The response has been overwhelming. They've found dozens of errors that I and several others have repeatedly overlooked. It's impressive, and humbling, and a bit embarrassing, and totally worth doing.

I will never again send anything out for publication without having a second set of eyes look over what I've written.

The most reasonable argument for free trade I can muster: A parable.

Bob and Phil live in North Dakota just south of the Canadian border. Bob is a rancher, Phil is a farmer. They have been trading Bob's beef for Phil's corn for the last five decades. They trade high-quality products at an exchange rate that both find attractive.

One day, a government official comes calling with the news that 100 years ago, the US Geological Survey made an error in surveying the border, and that Phil actually lives in Canada.

Bob promptly stops trading with Phil and buys his corn from Neil, who lives in Nebraska. It costs more, and it's not as good, but at least he's buying American.

Steve Jobs on Creativity

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

On Rick Perry

When asked by a schoolkid about his views on evolution, Texas Governor and Presidential hopeful Rick Perry answers, "In Texas, we teach both creationism and evolution, because I figure you're smart enough to figure out which one's right."

So, according to Perry, one is right, and one is wrong. And apparently the little guy is smart enough to figure out which is which, but his teachers and his school board and his state board of education and his Governor are not. Because if they were, they would recognize the foolishness in teaching something in public schools that they know to be wrong.


You can't have it both ways, Governor.

Scholarship, revisited.

Last night, I dug out the table of contents that I developed when I first started my textbook project, and compared it to the current table of contents. The big ideas are largely the same, but:

• Many--very many--of the things I had indicated I would cover in each chapter have been discarded and replaced with better things.
• I have discarded a chapter or two altogether, and have added about five.

My book is a much better book for those changes. And those changes are the result of hours and hours and hours of thought that occurred both while I was sitting at the keyboard and also during the hours between writing sessions. Those hours of thought, hours that would never have existed had I not been writing, revealed that some of the ideas I began with were silly. They also showed me that to establish a unified thesis for the entire text, I needed to cover topics I hadn't considered at the outset. 

I had been teaching the topics covered in the textbook for years before a single word was ever committed to paper. And if I'd never written a word, the course would have been good enough. But putting pen to paper has made my course and my teaching better: sharper analysis, greater rigor, better examples and deeper ideas. Those hours have clarified my thoughts and made me a better professor. And that, to my mind, is the importance of scholarship. Scholarship and teaching are not necessarily substitutes, wherein more of one means less of the other. They can be complements, in which more and better scholarship results in better teaching.

Scholarship

Last week, a group of faculty met to discuss professional development. It was interesting to watch the conversation unfold -- as it did, it was clear that the faculty were making a distinction between professional development (examples of which might include attending conferences, teaching workshops, and the like) and scholarship (which implies some research project or creative activity with an original end product). At Baker, professional development is a required chunk of the duties we are evaluated on; scholarship is viewed as a subset of professional development. At Baker, that ordering implies that you can't get tenure/promotion without professional development, but that it is possible to do so without any scholarship.

Keeping in mind that this is my opinion only, I think this is unfortunate. One reason that it is unfortunate is that it is through the process of scholarship--of taking a problem and really wrestling with it--that we deepen our understanding of our field. Anyone who has ever written a term paper knows that it is one thing to read about a topic, but another thing entirely to write about it. The writing process helps us clarify and organize our thoughts in ways that reading, and even deep thinking, cannot.  If you'll forgive me quoting a bit of economics jargon, Dierdre McClosky sums this up: "Economically speaking, the production function for thinking cannot be written as the sum of two sub-functions, one producing 'results' and the other 'writing them up.'The function is not separable. You do not learn the details of an argument until writing it in detail, and in writing the details you uncover flaws in the fundamentals." The same, of course, holds true for creative activity--it's one thing to look at, and even critically evaluate, a piece of art; it's another thing entirely to create artwork of your own.

A second, and not inconsequential, reason that I believe a faculty should be engaged in scholarship is that it brings recognition to the university. As a university, we want people to know who we are and what we do. We want them to see that we're an engaged and active faculty. We want them to think, "These people at Baker are doing interesting things. When my kid is ready to go to college, I want him to think about going there."

But the most important reason for faculty to engage in scholarship is the simplest. As an institution, we routinely ask our students to research, write, and create. We laud the virtues of becoming lifelong learners. Our gen-ed program is based on a foundation of inquiry-based learning, in which students ask interesting questions, figure out what tools they'll need to answer those questions, and then actually work toward finding an answer and sharing it with others. If we, as a faculty, are going to ask our students to do these things, shouldn't we be doing them ourselves? Shouldn't we be modeling lifelong learning? Won't engaging in our own scholarship help us teach that process to our students? Won't we understand our students' struggles better if we routinely face the same struggles ourselves? Economist and mathematician Steven Landsburg summarizes these ideas for his daughter in his book, Fair Play: "When choosing a college, try this thought experiment: Imagine that you've walked into a living room where a small circle of people is talking animatedly and excitedly while several others sit quietly on the sidelines. If you wanted to know what the conversation was about, who would you prefer to ask? If you think the participants would give you a more accurate and enticing answer than the observers, then you should go to a university where you're going to be taught by active researchers."

I think the Baker faculty are wonderful. I think they accomplish a lot with limited resources. I would be happy to send my own kid here. But I think the fact that scholarship is not a required element of our work does our faculty a disservice. I don't want new faculty to be relieved that research and scholarship aren't required at Baker. I don't think we should hire the type of person who is relieved that scholarship is not required. I want Baker to be a place were faculty are challenged to develop their intellects, just as we challenge our students to develop theirs. And I want Baker to be a place where scholarship is both encouraged and supported.

I find it strangely comforting when . . .

friends who profess to hate capitalism and corporations and who extol the virtue in buying local feel joy when assembling their new IKEA furniture.

Respite

For the past two weeks (and for two weeks hence), I've been teaching a summer class to a group of students who will be officially entering college in the fall. It's an academic boot camp for them: four weeks, six credit hours, total immersion.

And it's total immersion for both student and teacher. Putting together two hours of activity each day, followed by grading homework and quizzes, is more than a full-time job. It's rewarding work, though, and the students are both totally overwhelmed and rising to the challenge. Makes me appreciate how underworked ordinary college students are, and strengthens my resolve to be tougher on them during the school year.

While all of this has been going on, I've completely ignored THE BOOK. Up to this point, THE BOOK has been an all-consuming activity: when I'm not writing, I'm thinking about writing, or wondering about the prospects for THE BOOK or musing on what I might want the cover of THE BOOK to look like.

For the first time in a long time, I haven't had the time to do that, and it's been good for me. Instead, I'm field-testing the book with my summer students, and reading it myself as I go. And I have to say (though some might say I'm a biased source) that it's not awful. Different than most textbooks, and certainly different in both style and substance than the ones I'm directly competing with. But it reads well, and I find it interesting enough (though if I found it boring I think that would be a really bad sign).

What the summer has done, then, is buoy my spirits about the project and strengthen my resolve to see it published. I'm happy with what I've done so far, and ready, once summer school is over, to see this project through to the end.

In the meantime, it's been a great rest.

Reviews

I sent my manuscript to an acquisitions editor, whose job it is to screen proposals and pick likely looking proposals for further consideration. Part of that process is sending out manuscript submissions for review by people who teach the subject matter regularly.

My manuscript was sent out to five reviewers in June, and it took for-EVER for the reviews to come back! Well, it seemed like forever. But truthfully, each reviewer had about a hundred pages to look at and make detailed comments on, which is not a small undertaking.

When the reviews came back, sometime in October, the acquisitions editor and I spent about an hour on the phone dissecting them. The good news was that the reviews were generally positive. The bad news was that several of the reviews noted that my preliminary table of contents did not include coverage of a fairly major topic area.

That lack of coverage might turn out to be a deal breaker. More on this soon.

Some progress

I've been chipping away at my book manuscript for the better part of two years . . . a chapter here, a chapter there. And I'm still five or so chapters away from completing the first draft. But today I had to put together what I've got, because I'll be teaching a summer school course that begins next week. I printed out the thirteen chapters I've completed, bundled them together, and took them to the mail and copy center to be copied and bound.

I know I'm a long way from being done. But it was very, very satisfying to pick up a spiral-bound copy of the work I've completed thus far. Flipped through it. Lotta words in there. Lotta hours tied up in it. Lotta problems and puzzles in there that took me years and years to figure out.

Hope it'll sell. But even if it doesn't, it'll be gratifying to hold it in my hands.

Publishers

When it was time to send out the prospectus, sample chapters, and supporting materials for the textbook I've been working on, one natural question was, "Who do I send this to?"

There are, after all, lots and lots of companies that publish books. And if you run out of companies, you can always publish your manuscript yourself through amazon.com or lulu or any of a number of self-publishing companies. But publishing a textbook in today's market is a bigger project than simply putting the book together. Today, textbooks come with lots of ancillary materials: websites, instructor's manuals, student study guides, electronic homework services, and so on. For better or worse, if you want your book to be competitive with others in your niche, you need to have those materials available for the people that want them, which means that you need to work with a company that specializes in publishing textbooks.

Even more important, selling your manuscript to an established textbook company gives you access to that company's distribution network. The biggest companies didn't get that way by accident, and one key ingredient in their success recipe is that they have a sales force of representatives that make regular visits to college campuses, visit personally with instructors, and try to convince them to adopt your text. Nobody will buy your book if they don't know about it; access to a well-established distribution network makes finding a publisher specializing in textbooks crucial.

There used to  be a lot of textbook publishers, but consolidation over the past fifteen or twenty years has cut the numbers significantly. Further, textbook publishers tend to specialize in particular fields. So when I was ready to send out my materials for review, I really only had about six publishers to choose from that I felt had the resources to make my book a commercial success.

I contacted both book representatives and acquisitions editors at those six companies, and forwarded each company my materials. Within a few days, I learned that one company was already developing a text in the same area with another author (so "Thanks, but no, thanks, we won't be reviewing your manuscript.") Another already publishes a couple of texts in the field already and wasn't anxious to put resources into a third. I got a much kinder rejection letter from them, including some helpful suggestions about my materials and a reference to a person at another company. I never heard anything back from three of the other companies at all, which made me a little sad.

But I struck gold with the sixth company, and thank goodness, because if I'd been rejected by everybody, I might have melted into a puddle. They were both interested in the text and anxious to send some chapters out for review by faculty members currently teaching the course. After a few quick phone calls and email exchanged with the acquisition editor, my chapters were sent off for review.

One hurdle jumped. Many, many more to go.

Entrepreneurship

One of the virtues of the free market is that the lure of profits encourages people to apply their talents to helping others. The folks that invented and improved the automobile, air conditioning, the personal computer, made our lives richer and fuller and much, much easier. But they didn't invent these things because the loved us; they invented these things and brought them to market only because we were willing to pay for them.

For many, if not most, entrepreneurs, going into business means putting a great deal of financial capital at risk. For small operations, in particular, that capital often comes directly from the entrepreneur. Frankly, I'm a tightwad and I'm very risk-averse, which means that I've ruled out the ordinary path to being a self-made man. I prefer a steady paycheck, I prefer to keep my hard-earned dollars in one piece, and I would feel terrible for myself and my family if I risked our financial security on a business venture that failed. I can't begin to describe the respect I have for people who attempt to go it alone--they're much braver than I am, or they have much more confidence in themselves and their vision than I am ever likely to.

Writing the textbook that I'm currently working on is as close as I'll ever likely come to being my own businessman. Like the entrepreneur who opens a new store or invents a new product, I think my product is innovative enough, interesting enough, or of sufficient quality that others will want to buy it. If I'm right, the book may do well enough to fund a comfortable retirement.  But like most entrepreneurs, I make a substantial investment before the end product ever hits store shelves, so if it's a dog, that investment disappears. Fortunately for me, my investment is largely measured in hours that probably would have been devoted to watching American Idol and the like, so if this project bombs, at least my savings account won't suffer. That makes me sort of a chicken, at least compared to others who sacrifice both their time and their money when they open a business, but I am what I am.

And that's what this project is going to be referred to from this day forward: Al's chicken-hearted foray into entrepreneurship.

Stage One: Finding a Publisher

About four years ago, I found myself at a Chinese restaurant telling my wife that I had an idea for a textbook to accompany a college-level economics course. The idea was put on hold for a couple of years while we relocated, added a family member, and changed jobs, but after a couple of years the idea resurfaced and I began to work on it in earnest. Job one was finding a publisher for the thing.

There are enough people writing fiction that publishing houses find themselves with no shortage of completed manuscripts to read. But nonfiction is a different story, and academic work is even harder to come by. With a scarcity of new and original ideas in the economics textbook market, I didn't have to write the complete book before trying to find a publisher. Instead, I put together a shorter proposal with a few sample chapters of material. 

It is the proposal that sells the idea behind your work.The proposal (called the prospectus) outlines the nature of the project, including a tentative table of contents, and it places the proposed book in context with its competitors. It points out the shortcomings of competing books and informs the publisher how the proposed mansucript remedies those shortcomings. It also attempts to establish a viable market for the project. 

I sent publishers four sample chapters, complete with accompanying case studies and exhibits. I also sent descriptions of four in-class experiments, one to accompany each chapter. These experiments are one of the selling points of the manuscript--no other book in my market segment has active learning exercises to accompany the text, a point that I emphasized in the prospectus.

Before I sent out the packet, I had a well-trained formerly professional copy editor (who happens to be a good friend) carefully review everything I had written. I cannot overemphasize the importance of having a second set of eyes look over your work--especially if that work involves explaining things to other. Writing needs to be clear, concise, and comprehensible, and my editor-friend did an outstanding job of turning a decent manuscript into an excellent one. I paid her in booze, but truly the work she did for me was worth much, much more.

After a frantic couple of months putting the finishing touches on my samples, the time came when I could no longer think of any reason to wait. I sent my submissions and began to wait.

Okay, so it's been awhile . . .

but I've had some reasons, maybe even good reasons, for neglecting this blog. First among those reasons is that I spent the spring semester at Harlaxton College as a visiting professor, which was a fabulous experience. And rather than duplicate my wife's efforts at blogging (which you can see at alnemgrant.com), I chose not to blog at all. The second reason is that much of my spare writing lately has been devoted to a textbook project that appear to be heading forward. I'm planning to share some thoughts and updates about that process here in the days, weeks, and months to come.