Here we go again . . .

Well, here we go again, if 'go' means 'going on hiatus.'

It's been a long time since I've written anything, largely due to lots and lots of other writing that I was (or will be) getting paid for. I wrote, by my count, one hundred thirty three pages during the spring semester, on top of my day job. That enabled me to finish a large and time-consuming project that I was proud to be part of, but glad to be finished with.

Now I find myself once devoted to my textbook. A first draft is due next April, a draft that my publisher says should be around 250,000 words. That is, for those of you who can't envision exactly what that adds up to, about three trashy mystery novels in length.

Here's some good news: I am making progress. Every few weeks, I crank through another chapter or so. My  manuscript, which I am about to use for a summer school course, is bigger than it was when I used it last fall. It is now 415 double-spaced pages. That seems like a lot, and it makes a decent-looking pile on my credenza, where I keep it as a reminder of how much I have done.

Here's some bad news: even though it is an impressive-looking pile of 415 pages, it still only adds up to 130,000 words. That is a bit more than a mystery novel and a half. I have a long way to go.

Here's some good news: I have a plan about where I will spend those remaining 120,000 words. Well, most of them, anyway.

Here's some bad news: Even with a plan, there is a boatload of writing and typing left to do. Cramming that in alongside my day job during the next year is going to be tremendously difficult.

Here's the surreal news: In a year, my first draft will be in. Within two years, the revisions will be done and the book will be on store shelves. This means that my work will be done. This project has occupied so very, very many hours of my days, evenings, and weekends for the past three years. And for every hour of work, I have probably spent ten hours thinking. It has been an all consuming enterprise. And so, in two years, it will be done.

It is just within the past couple of days that this reality has hit home. With that reality has come a very real question and a really big fear: Once this thing is done, what the hell am I supposed to do with myself?

One last bit of good news: the book is decent. I've written schlock before, and know it when I see it. This will not be schlock. I am proud of what I have done. And, out of courtesy to you and respect for my own dignity, I promise not to spend much time tooting my own horn from now on. But thank you for indulging me tonight.

Inspirational Quote

"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing."
    --Kingsley Amis

Being Humbled

Yes, this is about that pesky textbook again, but there's a broader lesson or two that apply in other contexts that I need to remember.

When the reviews of my sample chapters came back, they were pretty positive. One or two of the reviewers said they would like to see some coverage of macro topics, and at the time, I brushed that off. The book I had envisioned was a book with a thesis, a thesis that glued micro topics together like epoxy. You could teach an entire semester and more with the book I envisioned, so why would I need any macro chapters?

But my editor was pretty firm that omitting macro topics was a deal breaker, and this was frustrating to me. This was my vision! After all, Hemingway didn't have an editor telling him how to refine his vision, did he?

Oh. Yes. He did. An editor that not only checked his mechanics, but whom Hemingway consulted on character development, plot, and whatnot. Key stuff.

Oh. Yeah. And I am not Hemingway.

And so I was reminded that publishing is a partnership. They put a lot of money into this project before the first copy ever hits bookstore shelves, and through that earn some right to have a say in its development. We both want to see this project be as successful as it possibly can be. And it turns out that lots of schools teach a one semester issues course with specified learning goals that include macro topics. Omit macro, and I automatically forego the chance to sell my book to those schools.

All of this, of course, is a year and a half ago.  Before Occupy Wall Street, before the partisan budget battles. And now, I realize that my editor was right: macro issues are not only important because they sell books, but they're important to ordinary people, and they're important to college students. My book will include macro issues, and it will be better for it. Humbling to realize that you were wrong. 

So I've been thinking about this for a few months now. I've even come up with some ways to tie the macro topics to the general theme that unifies my micro topics. And those micro chapters are largely done. So it is time to start the macro, and to be honest, I have not written anything in macro before. I am in uncharted waters here, and a bit worried about it. Nevertheless, tonight, I begin.

A new semester has begun . . .

and I am reminded how much fun it is to see familiar faces, happy faces, ready to learn whatever it is we're going to study in class this semester.

Work itself is not always fun, but having students that I know and like is a great joy.

Okay, you caught me again . . .

It's been awhile since I've posted, and while I do claim that the intervening months have been ridiculously busy (they have!), I do need to get back into the habit of writing periodically.

A new school year has just begun, and now that I am back in school I am motivated again to resume work on other projects as well. First among them: the textbook project. In early Novermber, I was offered a contract based on the work I had submitted and had reviewed a couple of summers ago. I promptly was advised to take the next couple of months off until I could finalize the contract and be assigned to a production editor, advice I was only too happy to take!

So now it's the new year, and despite being mostly done with the text in my own mind, I am now on the hook to double the quantity going into the text (yep, there's a word count in the contract!), which is a bit daunting. I do have several more chapters to write, which I will talk about in a post in the near future. Whatever the case, it is time to get busy once again, and I have set for myself a target of one hundred pages by the end of the term.

Any questions between now and victory? Good. Let's get started.

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.