“I don’t know what to write about.” The affliction plagues us all. The blinking cursor mocks us. Everything else in our lives that needs to be done calls out to us, saying “don’t write right now. Watch a movie. Clean the kitchen. Aren’t you hungry? It’s a nice day for a walk. You’re tired—you really […]
Bust Your Writer’s Block
“I don’t know what to write about.” The affliction plagues us all. The blinking cursor mocks us. Everything else in our lives that needs to be done calls out to us, saying “don’t write right now. Watch a movie. Clean the kitchen. Aren’t you hungry? It’s a nice day for a walk. You’re tired—you really […]
Bust Your Writer’s Block
“I don’t know what to write about.” The affliction plagues us all. The blinking cursor mocks us. Everything else in our lives that needs to be done calls out to us, saying “don’t write right now. Watch a movie. Clean the kitchen. Aren’t you hungry? It’s a nice day for a walk. You’re tired—you really […]
How I Organize My Bookshelf
I have a few hundred books in my office. In light of something that recently came across my social media feed, here’s how I organize them. Alphabetically by author. It makes them easy to find. McCloskey’s Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain? Over there. North’s Structure and Change in Economic History? Right there. Liberty Fund’s […]
I Read Things: Thomas Sowell Edition
Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite economists and intellectuals, and here are some of my favorite books in his oeuvre. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I first read this at the suggestion of my colleague Mark McMahon at Rhodes College, and beginning in 2007-08 I started assigning it in my […]
I Read Things: Thomas Sowell Edition
Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite economists and intellectuals, and here are some of my favorite books in his oeuvre. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I first read this at the suggestion of my colleague Mark McMahon at Rhodes College, and beginning in 2007-08 I started assigning it in my […]
I Read Things: Thomas Sowell Edition
Thomas Sowell is one of my favorite economists and intellectuals, and here are some of my favorite books in his oeuvre. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I first read this at the suggestion of my colleague Mark McMahon at Rhodes College, and beginning in 2007-08 I started assigning it in my […]
Appearances Can Be Deceiving: We’re Wasting Resources Making Solar Panels in the US
At the end of January, CNN reported that in response to new tariffs on solar panels, Chinese solar panel manufacturer JinkoSolar would build a plant in the United States. These tariffs make Americans poorer, not richer. The nineteenth-century French economist Frederic Bastiat exhorted us to look beyond what is immediately apparent to the harder-to-see but […]
Just Give Them Water Filters And Whatnot
Infant and child mortality has fallen precipitously in the last few centuries, and life expectancy has increased dramatically. We have made a lot of progress in the protection of public health, but we are still wasting staggering amounts of life that gets snuffed out early by disease and war. Consider diarrhea, which is an inconvenience […]
I Read Things: African History for Young Readers
There’s a little “community library” a few blocks away from our house in front of a closed convenience store. We’ve made a few deposits and quite a few withdrawals, and it seems like there’s always something interesting (and always a lot of stuff that isn’t so interesting, like pulp-worthy harlequin romance). One of my more […]