Index of My Writings
Everything I've Written (and Managed to Find) Linked from One Post, with Some Explanation
After years of not blogging, I'm trying to restart in order to position myself to help a potential publisher market a book I've written. It's a book of Christian apologetics entitled The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity, emulating my #1 intellectual hero, CS Lewis.
This post is an index of me and my writings, trying to get all the links in one place, so that potential publishers of The Grand Coherence, and by the way anyone else who might happen to be interested, can get up to speed on who I am as an author. Don't read to the end! Read through it until your interest is caught by one of the links, then follow it, and read that. Then come back later and find more.
And please subscribe! And repost this to social media! Every bit of attention, every follower, any evidence of interest in my writings should get me a little closer to fulfilling my dream of publishing The Grand Coherence.
Defending Christianity
A few more words about that unpublished book.
I've written The Grand Coherence already, or almost all of it. Like Descartes and Socrates, it starts by probing the foundations of knowledge. Then it explores the natural sciences, concluding with a hard-hitting takedown of scientific materialism as a worldview.
Next, it explores two hot topics: (a) Genesis and creation, sketching a concordance of the day-age interpretation of Genesis 1 with mainstream natural history; and (b) sexual ethics, where it explains how to combine Golden Rule ethics with the insights of sociobiology about human nature to build a strong case for the traditional Christian sexual rules.
Finally, the book moves on to the positive case for Christianity, starting with the universally recognized ideas of a good creation and a tragic fall (I call this level of wisdom "pre-Christianity"), and going on to Jesus and the Church as a vehicle of salvation from a vitiated and mortal world which nonetheless has much worth saving.
I seek to emulate C.S. Lewis in his intellectual rigor and imagination, as well as his joy, and to be effective in both a persuasive and a pastoral way, convincing the doubters and nourishing the faithful.
The book takes its point of departure from my Touchstone article of the same name (here, but unfortunately it's gated), and also channels arguments from The Verdict of Reason and my article in Public Discourse, "Why Premarital Sex is Wrong," as well as a touch of my "The Economics of Monasticism." But more than channeling my own past writing, the book channels the arguments of the writers I admire most: C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. It has to move pretty far beyond them into new territory in some ways to keep up with modern discoveries, but is faithful to their spirit, teachings and ideas. Some parts of the book channel Michael Behe, William Dembski, and Stephen Mayer.
If you're intrigued by The Grand Coherence, I'm eager to share! I can't provide a public link, though, because I want to check the box for publishers saying that it's original content that hasn't been distributed before. Upon request, not only can I send Google doc links, Word, etc., but I can also produce audio files with an AI voice in case you'd rather listen than read. Maybe I'll use this Substack to quote and respond to feedback to raise interest in the unpublished book.
Now on to my other writings.
My Articles Get More Readers than My Books
While I've published quite a few reasonably well placed and well-read articles– my article "The Grand Coherence" in Touchstone, for example, was the point of departure for the book The Grand Coherence– I've never had any luck marketing books. Principles of a Free Society, For the Refreshment of the Spirit, Schiller: The Monk's Goat, The Rustic: Songs of Maine, The Verdict of Reason: Why Gay Marriage Can't Be the Real Thing and Shouldn't Be Recognized in Law, and Jove's Chariot: A Tale of Adventure from the Near Future Airship Age are all obscure. With that track record, I'm afraid publishers will be reluctant to take a risk on The Grand Coherence, particularly since it's long and the argument is difficult.
But I'm more interested in writing books than in writing articles. There's not enough space in an article to work out important ideas properly. That's why I'm hoping this blog will promote my writings and myself as an author, through fascinating, hard-hitting and/or persuasive essays on topics that are permanently salient, as an advertisement for books I've written or will write. A blogb of convenient to subscribe to or promote on social media.
Intellectual Friendships
By the way, I can't talk about my writing without wanting to stop and thank many individual thinkers with whom I've made intellectual friendships over the years, which I hope this blog will help me to maintain. I owe much of my inspiration to them.
I have enjoyed, and hope to enjoy again, fascinating intellectual exchanges with people like: Bryan Caplan, Vipul Naik, Michelangelo Landgrave, Lant Pritchett, Alex Nowrasteh, and Mark Wyman; my immediate family members Rachel Lu, Steve Smith, Jesse Smith, and Christian Smith, as well as my uncle Val Larsen, who have strong propensities for intellectual exploration and debate; Nathan Powell, Thomas Reasoner, Marco Barreno, Seth Vitrano-Wilson, Lord Nat Wei, Nicholas Aguelakakis, Barry Prentice, Brent Skorup, Eli Dourado, Nick Schulz, Carl Shulman, Max Borders, Zac Gochenour, Michael Clemens, Stephen Sloyer, Stephen Louria, Matthew Greenland, and Garett Jones, and some others. I should also thank formative influences Tyler Cowen, Jeff Sachs, and Tom Palmer.
At this stage of life, with a day job and a flourishing young family to look after, debate and argumentative exploration of truth are a pastime I can indulge much less than I would like. But I hope at least to keep myself and my way of thinking on their radar screen. I love nothing in life so much as the search for truth, and the relatively few who are qualified to share that journey with me are more precious than rubies. Friends, please subscribe, and comment freely! It's good to keep in touch!
One Post to Link Them All, One Post to Find Them/ One Post to Bring Them All, and in the Noosphere Bind Them
Again, the main purpose of this introductory post is simply to get links to all my writings in one place, so that people who like something I've written can find other things I've written, and in order to create a coherent intellectual identity for myself.
My writings have hitherto been a little hard to connect with a single author and look up intentionally. There are accidental reasons for this. My full given name, "Nathanael Smith," is always shortened to "Nathan Smith" in my face-to-face interactions, but I've published under both names, and the latter is so common as to be almost unGoogleable. But the obscurity has also been partly deliberate, because I tend to be a rather dissident writer, offending the pieties of left and right by turns, and more often than not, I've held jobs that might be jeopardized by certain of my writings being known.
I'm taking a risk with this post by making it easier for useful friends, and future potential employers, to discover that I've written something that offends them. But at the end of the day, one has to be a bit brave to lead a worthwhile life.
I haven't been able to find all my past writings, and the list of links here is quite incomplete. But I'll keep trying. As I find more, I'll add links to them at the end.
Blogs
For sheer quantity of text, blogs comprise most of my writing.
Since 2011, I've blogged for the group blog at Open Borders: The Case regularly for a few years. I started two short-lived special purpose blogs. Reinventing Economics was a quest to update and build on the ideas in my dissertation. The Roadless Revolution: Pioneering a New Age of Giant Airships was an effort to brainstorm and promote airship technology, but I soon transferred that effort over to the All About Airships blog at ISO Polar instead.
Before 2011, I was a prolific blogger. I wrote at Towards a Good Samaritan World, The Free Thinker, and briefly at From Malawi. There may have been a couple of other blogs which I can't now find.
I've also engaged in the "microblogs" of social media, sometimes abusing Facebook as a platform for long-form essays when most users are there to keep in touch or relax, sometimes making forays into the depressing meme war of Twitter, sometimes risking my professional persona by marketing ideas through LinkedIn. Kudos to Substack for reviving the creative, exploratory, serious ethos of the early blogosphere through the magic of convenience.
Out of all this blogging, what do I recommend to readers? All About Airships is the best place I know of to learn why airships are an underappreciated and underinvested technology which stands ready to emerge as a world-transforming trillion-dollar industry if a critical mass of money, engineering brainpower, and entrepreneurial talent ever gets together to make it happen.
Open Borders: The Case powerfully argues that migration restrictions should be abolished for the sake of justice and the betterment of the human condition. It may have tapped out its theme, and we kept on writing after we had tapped it out. I'll write about it again, but it's a matter of repackaging a body of thought for different audiences. We've won all the arguments intellectually, and lost them all politically, and more words alone will never change that. Civil disobedience, faith and conscience, not argument, will need to make the next move.
I'd love for Reinventing Economics to get more readership. I just reread it while writing this post, and found it fascinating. You've never read economics like this. But I have to warn that it's an unfinished intellectual project, and the posts mingle rigorous and unrigorous material in a way that makes my method a bit unclear. There are a lot of unfulfilled promises about future posts, and if I had written those posts, my method might have been easier to understand. Still, dive right in! The blog seeks to unpack, popularize, and build on my 2011 dissertation, entitled Complexity, Competition, and Growth: Key Ideas from Adam Smith, Modeled Using Agent-Based Simulation, which is a groundbreaking but unread contribution to economic theory. It proves, for example, that supply curves can slope down, and shows how capitalist economies progressively explore and exploit the space of technological possibilities. But it was written for an audience of platonic ideal philosopher-economists that doesn't exist, as I was stubbornly slow to admit to myself. Reinventing Economics is written for more of an actual flesh-and-blood audience. The educated general reader could grasp it with a bit of work. But it's incomplete.
I'd like to communicate my full vision of the nature and workings of capitalism properly at some point. Hmm. Let me know if you're interested?
Thanks to My Editors!
Turning now to writings that were published via some kind of editorial gatekeeper, let me start by giving a general shout-out of thanks to my editors.
Part of the motivation for blogging is to avoid editors, and the way they constrain what one writes about and what positions one takes. In almost everything that I've "published" in the old-fashioned sense, involving an editor, I see some bias due to the venue and the editor's or publication's preferences. I can't write what I want for an editor. I can't even quite write what I believe.
Nonetheless, good editors, of whom I've had quite a few, add net value. It is among writings that I've published through editors that I find the works that I'm most proud of, that I reread with the most enjoyment, and that I most want the world to read.
Case in point: "The Fruitful Fusionism of Frederic Bastiat," in Law and Liberty is the most recent of these, and as usual with me, it packs in more than the title would suggest. An aside about MacIntyre is at once respectful and dismissive, while I cast Bastiat as a champion of my own long-time project of mingling Lockean natural rights and social contract ideas with free market economics. Thus I write:
Sometimes popularizers, pundits, and politicians are wiser than allied academicians because they have to convince ordinary people. Bastiat is a case in point. He knew economics, but he also argued from natural law premises that were intuitively appealing and foundational to liberalism. Even then, natural law was becoming unfashionable among the intelligentsia. He shines in retrospect as a late spokesman for a lost tradition of classical liberalism based on natural law, whose roots in law and public opinion have since withered away.
And:
Bastiat is also valuable for the way he synthesized two traditions, historically allied yet rarely integrated, namely (a) economics, and (b) theistic liberalism based on natural law.
The editor who helped get that Bastiat article to a state where I was really proud of it was my sister, Rachel Lu. Thanks again!
My 2010 book Principles of a Free Society similarly presents a liberal political vision based on both free market economics and natural law, inspired by and channeling John Locke. But it wasn't as well edited.
The Defense of Classical Liberalism
A fair amount of writing that I've done is motivated by the defense of classical liberalism or free market capitalism against leftism and statism. That sounds like plain-vanilla libertarianism, but in fact there's more fundamental theoretical innovation and creative fusion of ideas than the titles might lead you to expect, as in Principles of a Free Society.
"The Fruitful Fusionism of Frederic Bastiat" is of course one example. Another is my article "The Christian Case for Global Capitalism," published in The Imaginative Conservative in 2016. I particularly like the definition of capitalism there:
Capitalism may be defined as an economic system in which:
Goods and services are produced mostly by large private enterprises voluntarily backed by many private savers through sophisticated financial intermediation; and
Public policy is shaped by mainstream economic theory, with a presumption in favor of the free market.
Building on that definition:
Capitalism democratizes the financing of large projects. Long before there were factories and railroads, society needed granaries, ships, and aqueducts. Society also wants great works of art and science. Who will finance it all? Not ordinary people, for their resources are too small. So, to simplify somewhat, in pre-Christian societies, large projects had to be financed by either (a) the state, or (b) rich people. Medieval Christendom added (c) the Church. That was good in one way since it gave a Christian coloring to art, architecture, literature, and learning. The downside was that the Church ended up handling lots of money, got entangled in worldly corruption, and became the subject of bitter envy.
Capitalism adds (d) corporations. Or more generally, the financial sector, including banks that take deposits and lend to companies, and the stock and bond markets. In various ways, these institutions amass the savings of many individual investors, and channel them into large projects that promise a financial return. Capitalism makes it possible for society to do without strong states, wealthy aristocracies, or a wealthy and worldly Church. Instead of requiring the patronage of governments and aristocratic or ecclesiastical patrons, large projects can be funded by ordinary savers, with the help of financial intermediaries.
Obviously, there's a lot more to be said about this. The article goes on to argue that neutrality among conceptions of the good, though sometimes associated with liberalism, is not essential to or historically characteristic of it. Rather, the deference of free market economics to revealed preference is a kind of delegation policy, whereby many questions about what is good are left to free individuals to decide, though they may get it wrong. Christianity can operate within the framework of freedom that capitalism offers to urge people to make good choices.
More generally, I've written in defense of many other conservative-libertarian causes, including Social Security privatization, school choice, proposed Obamacare reversal, anti-zoning and free markets in land, and traditional marriage. In retrospect, I feel about all this free market advocacy a little like someone who has unknowingly lent a hunting rifle to a serial killer. Conservative pundits like me helped build up the political coalition which somehow got hijacked by a scoundrel in 2016 and nearly destroyed the American republic on January 6, 2021. The psychology that could make someone imagine that support for that public enemy #1 had anything at all to do with conservatism is utterly opaque to me. Who are these people?
I'm a loyal Democrat now, just because I want to bequeath the American Republic to my children and one party is currently locked in a stance of enmity towards democracy, truthfulness and the rule of law. But I don't put my hope in politics or even take much interest in it now. I've come round to a feeling that the best public policy is private virtue.
Open Borders
I'm not famous, but the closest I've come to fame is for my advocacy of open borders. I wonder how much of that I've written. A million words? Maybe even more?
I can't help but be proud of my Foreign Affairs article, "A World Without Borders," because of its placement. I seem to recall that it's a good, well-written argument, too, but unfortunately, it's gated. Someone posted the full text in a blog comment somewhere. I'll link to that if I find it. However, my case for open borders, starting with articles in Tech Central Station back in the 2000s which unfortunately no longer seem to be findable online, and continuing through my 2010 book Principles of a Free Society and years of blogging at Open Borders: The Case, as well as spin-off articles like "What it Justice Demands Open Borders?" and "Don't Restrict Immigration, Tax It," and this immigration debate at The Freeman, has always been essentially the same:
Governments have no legitimate power to restrict immigration, because the right to wield legitimate force arises from a social contract to protect human rights. But peaceful migration does not violate rights, and so does not provide a legitimate occasion to exercise contrary force.
Also, migration is economically beneficial, first of all to immigrants themselves, by revealed preference and plenty of empirical data, and then to all sorts of counterparties in transactions with them. Fundamentally, it raises productivity and creates a surplus, enriching many, although some lose out from competition with immigrants.
Some have a legitimate, self-interested objection to increasing immigration on the ground that shifting relative prices in the new macroeconomic equilibrium resulting from open borders will impoverish them (though probably far more think they stand to be impoverished than really do) and they're economically struggling already. But their concerns can be addressed through the government's ability to use its tax and transfer system to compensate the losers. Governments should tax immigration rather than restricting it, and can thereby achieve a roughly Pareto-improving outcome.
Open borders, then, is a win-win-win policy, yet I would almost despair of its ever getting past the ignorance and inertia of public opinion, if it weren't for the power of civil disobedience, as I discuss in my article "A Face for the Faceless," as well as in chapter 8 of Principles of a Free Society.
Some of my thinking about the likely practical impact of an open borders policy is described in the Open Borders post "How Would a Billion Immigrants Change the American Polity," which got quite a bit of attention from the broader internet.
The most life-changing post at Open Borders for me personally was "The Old Testament on Immigration." Before I wrote it, I had long advocated open borders on liberal and libertarian and humanitarian and international development grounds, but I guessed that I was probably a little bit at odds with the Bible. In doing so, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I think many Christians have of wanting to be on God's side but thinking they're really a bit more enlightened than He is. How wrong I was! I discovered that the Bible is absolutely, unambiguously for open borders, more zealously and uncompromisingly, in fact, even than I am! I'm a moderate in that, while I wouldn't exclude anyone by force, I would use taxes and transfers to hold natives harmless. The Bible gives no warrant for such moderation. Anyone could come into ancient Israel under the Mosaic law, and anyone who wished could be naturalized into full membership in it. There was no exclusion at all. Here again, you see how my idiosyncratic bundle of issue positions actually fit together. Christian apologist and open borders advocate go hand in hand. I champion God's plan to save mankind, and God's immigration policy.
Open Borders: The Case, in its heyday, got enough reach to attract some commentary even from unsympathetic writers. I'll always remember the amusingly titled Michael Barone article, "Open borders would produce dystopia, says open borders advocate." Heh.
And here's an interview with me on YouTube.
More immigration writings: "The Global Economic Impact of Open Borders," "What an Enlightened Immigration Policy Would Look Like," and "Don't Restrict Immigration, Tax It." "The Global Economic Impact of Open Borders" builds a model, or you might say a simulation, of the world economy, closely tied to the data, in which the wealth and poverty of nations is explained by a combination of human capital and place-based total factor productivity. It then uses the model to project what would happen if all immigration restrictions were eliminated. It focuses on two scenarios, one in which market simply clear, resulting in population flows that I think are implausibly large, and another where I attempt to adjust in the direction of more realism at the expensive some arbitrariness by allowing for feedback of migration into total factor productivity in sending and receiving countries. It predicts roughly a doubling of world GDP under open borders, but also the migration of billions, learning to a completely transformed human geography of the world. Do I believe that would really happen? Yes. I tend to find a good theoretical model pretty persuasive.
Poetry, Fiction and Songs
I was fascinated to discover recently that Bryan Caplan has written fiction for years. I had no idea. But I approve! We should form a Fiction Writers, Anonymous club, or something.
It's hard to break out of the mentality that regards non-fiction articles and books as a scholar's "real" career, and songs, stories, novels, poems, and the like as a hobby or distraction. I think it's because people don't understand the kind of truth that fiction and poetry have to offer. I view poetry as the principal vehicle for contemplating the essential goodness of things, which in turn is an indispensable ingredient of reason. And I view fiction, especially novels, as the best laboratories for the study of the virtues. It's largely unfeasible and very unethical to conduct experiments about right and wrong conduct on real people, so you have to do it on imaginary characters. People's sense for the realism of fiction supplies to measure, imperfect of course, of how much truth has been achieved.
With this in mind, here are some of my works of fiction and poetry, which I put forward, as essential components of my work, and claimants to convey important truths.
First, The Rustic: Songs of Maine (or for free here) is a book of poetry celebrating the delights of rural life, interwoven with themes of faith and family. It's partly biographical, though it sublimates my very pleasant personal experiences settling on a beautiful bit of acreage in central Maine into a kind of archetype. It aligns with the idea of the Benedict Option, or at least the poems can be read with a Benedict Option community implicitly in the background.
Second, For the Refreshment of the Spirit: A Fairy Tale is a half-baptized romantic legend of great beauty. I composed it, based on a dream, long before my baptism, then wrote it down a few years after it, having lost an early manuscript and carried it in my memory for many years. The Christian glosses that I added work, I think, but don't alter the spirit of the story much. It's a tale of innocence, and Sehnsucht, the spell beauty casts over the soul, and of cruelty and treachery bred of envy, and of a knight who spends his whole life questing for lost love, and is vouchsafed for his reward a vision of the fairies. I can't help pitying those who haven't read it, as if they're missing out on a dimension of reality. It's almost the only sad work among my poetry and fiction; it will almost break your heart.
Third, Schiller: The Monk's Goat is the story of two boys whose families settle near a monastery to escape the tedium, meaningless bustle, and corruption of modern life. One becomes the helper of the monastery goatkeeper and discovers a bliss he'd never known, till he falls under the bad influence of the other, who liked being cool at school and resents the change. But God resolves the various stories brilliantly through the capers of a runaway goat. Partly comic, and suitable for children, the story is also a dramatization of the Benedict Option. As in many stories, the background is more important than the foreground. The place and the community where the tale is set is more than half the point of the story.
Fourth, Jove's Chariot, also available chapter by chapter (through chapter 5) on Substack, and as an (AI) audiobook. This is a novel-length advertisement for a feasible technology awaiting a breakthrough. The giant airship age in which it's set could be realized, if capitalists or governments would just invest enough to get over an initial investment hurdle. Here are a few plot points from this rather sensational novel:
As backstory, by 2046, a giant airship industry has emerged but not matured.
In that year, the corporate owner of a fusion power plant in Zambia sabotages it to avenge its being nationalized, causing a blackout and humanitarian crisis.
A philanthropist commissions an airship to deliver an enormous nano-engineered torus to the power plant, to repair it. It's the only mode of transport that can make the delivery.
The dispossessed corporate owner of the plant conducts a deceptive PR campaign labeling the airship crew "agents of nuclear proliferation," and gets most of the world's nations to sign a revolution prohibiting them to make the delivery on pain of being outlawed.
Zambia's populist president persuades the crew to continue the mission by a personal appeal nonetheless.
A major storm system blocks the way, and the philanthropist, and his nephew, the captain, impatient of delay, drive the airship into it, while the most experienced crewmen, the "old hands," refusing to obey orders, are officially discharged, though still on board.
The airship is nearly destroyed, and the captain loses his nerve, but the old hands take over at the last minute and save the airship.
Unwilling to obey their captain and his uncle anymore, the crew hold a meeting while the airship floats over the Congo jungle, decide to seize the airship, and elect one of the old hands, Jake Munro, as their new captain. They come to be known as the "Flying Republic of Outlaws."
The crew fly into Zambia, where they are welcomed as heroes, deliver the part, and end the blackout.
Subject to arrest if they return home, and needing to earn their living somehow, the crew spend two years servicing remote African mines that can only be accessed by airship.
Morale collapses briefly when they discover $200 million of gold in an isolated mind that has descended into chaos, and, not knowing what to do, they bury it in the desert. All begin to suspect each other.
A Franciscan priest who has been traveling with them revives morale by getting them work with humanitarian relief organizations.
For four years, they keep intensely busy with disaster relief and economic development work: delivering fruit trees and high quality steers for breeding, flood relief, famine relief, firefighting, etc. Life is bliss.
The crew also recruits a naturalist, who finds a line of business rescuing wounded animals that they see along the way, for donation to zoos.
They help catch a pirate ship by tracking it at sea, and driving it out of one friendly island port by dropping things on it from above, till US Navy ships arrived to seize it.
One vengeful pirate from the captured ship, who is nicknamed The Shark, becomes an airship hunter sworn to kill them, so they come to fear helicopters.
Morale stumbles again when, trying to help during an ethnic cleansing, they witness a massacre of hundreds of people from immediately above, but are helpless to intervene.
Trying to redeem themselves, they secretly smuggle arms to supposed freedom fighters against the Islamist regime in Ethiopia, only to abort at the last minute when Captain Jake intuits that the supposed freedom fighters are con artists.
Their case finally comes before Congress, and amnesty is expected, but falters because Indian biotech firms complain that the Flying Republic violated their IP through deliveries of fruit trees with proprietary genetics.
Disappointed, and fearing The Shark, the crew flees to Antarctica, where an airship-enabled mineral boom is underway.
After 2 years, weary of adventure, the crew settle for a while in Argentina, one of the few countries not to have outlawed them, making their living hauling fish from the Antarctic fisheries to Argentina. Tourists flock to see the famous airship.
Feeling the need for the Flying Republic to live up to its legend, Captain Jake recruits a beautiful actress to help inspire the crew to return to relief work.
During floods in Nigeria, as medevac specialists amidst the larger UN-led relief mission, the men of the Flying Republic rescue thousands, and save hundreds of lives, dazzling the world.
As their techniques are imitated by regular relief organizations, the crew find themselves obsolete for relief work, but asked to leverage their fame for fundraising instead. Though somewhat disappointed, Captain Jake consents to have a movie made on the airship about Jove's Chariot's gallant rescues in Lagos, starring his actress.
Following the movie's success, they launch a reality TV show, and conduct a world tour, with the billionaire passengers' astronomical fares donated to the campaign against world hunger. The tour starts with a focus on spectacular wildlife encounters, but changes focus when many cities beg Jove's Chariot to visit, greeting it everywhere with cheering crowds while the airship does stunts and sprays out candy parachutes.
Starting in 2058, a famine starts in Ethiopia in the midst of a civil war. With rebels controlling the roads, airships are the only hope of effective famine relief. But the Taliban regime ruling Ethiopia prohibits non-Muslim foreign aid, and Western governments, habituated for a decade to appeasing Taliban nuclear blackmail, ban it as well.
Humanitarian relief organizations are torn on whether to mobilize to deliver food aid illegally. To get past fear and resistance, they recruit Captain Jake, Jove's Chariot, and the Flying Republic of Outlaws to lead.
I'll stop there so as not to give away the whole plot, but the novel is packed with airship use cases designed to open Big Money's eyes to the enormous potential of this very underinvested and underutilized technology. It's critical to the purpose of the novel that Jove's Chariot is meant to be a machine that could really be built. Engineers, prove me wrong! If a real airship couldn't stop what Jove's Chariot does, I'll alter the plotline to make it realistic. Technological realism of my contract with the reader.
At the same time, I put forward Captain Jake as a hero suitable for our times: a free man, a leader, working for the good in the persistent, no-nonsense way that so many of us work for an employer, even to the point of death, chaste and high-minded and romantic, American and working class in culture, but a thoroughgoing modern knight in ethos. Fair warning: I feel this novel is unfinished, like a sculpture halfway cut out of a rock. The story is written to the end, but the style is only partway refined to the smooth quality you want in the best novels.
Fifth, my series of fifteen "Songs Based on the Gospels." I feel the need to disclaim them by saying that their lyrics are less authoritative than the text of the scriptures on which they are based, although maybe that's too obvious to mention. But they try to bring out meanings in those texts that people might have missed, and help people's imaginations lean into them, with the mnemonic and aesthetic benefits of rhyme and meter and music.
Virtue, Evolutionary Psychology and Social Conversatism
Next topic. The Verdict of Reason: Why Gay Marriage Can't Be the Real Thing and Shouldn't Be Recognized in Law will strike many as a weird and unfortunate book for me to have written. What does it have to do with economics? Or open borders? Or my dissertation, international development, public administration, or anything I've studied in or have a claim to expertise in? Isn't this just the resentment of a guy left behind by history coming up with excuses?
And I could rebut that it's ignorant to judge a book if you haven't read the argument. And that a strict separation of economics from biology makes little sense when humans are biological creatures. Moreover, economics originally meant household management, and households continue to be the atoms of the economy today, so household composition can't be irrelevant to economics. Etc.
But I want to start off on a different foot.
So let me first say thank you. Thank you to the gay marriage movement, for provoking me to write about this. I enjoyed writing The Verdict of Reason, and I learned a lot. And it wasn't just by luck that they did me a good turn. Gay marriage advocacy was a generous-minded and moralistic effort, and good intentions rarely fail to benefit someone. I don't really believe the old adage that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." I think people who are trying to do the right thing usually make the world a better place, even when they're mistaken, and even when they change it in unexpected ways.
I wasn't surprised to find out that gay marriage advocates are wrong. It's prima facie implausible that the extremely tiny minority of historic mankind that believes men can marry men or women marry women should be right, and the vast, vast, vast majority would be wrong. And a careful study of the question did confirm what crude majoritian math foresaw. But it was incredibly fun to discover why. And it profoundly enriched my view of human nature, and I think also my ability to maintain, enjoy, and thrive in my own marriage.
The Verdict of Reason shows, first, that free societies recognize neither total rights of self-binding, which would entail being able to sell oneself into slavery, nor zero rights of self-binding, which would make contracts impossible and cripple long-term planning and cooperation, but limited self-binding. People can legally bind themselves in some ways and not others. To make good choices about what kinds of self-binding to recognize and enforce, societies need to (a) have a substantive vision of human telos or the good life and strive to discern what kinds of self-binding contribute to it, and (b) rely on tradition to coordinate expectations and help people learn from the experience of past generations. Marriage, of course, deserves endorsement on both grounds; gay marriage does not.
Second, it proves the definition of marriage ethically, biologically, and historically, and discovers that marriage is, and always has been, a more or less permanent relationship binding a woman to a man, such that sex can occur between them without dishonor to the woman. It gives male jealousy what it needs, and requires something in return, starting with protection. The definition is rooted in evolutionary psychology and instinct and therefore unalterable in its essentials by culture, yet it's also a moral achievement, rising above the far more predatory forms of sexuality which would be endemic without self-control and societal regulation of sex.
I know some people won't like this. For a lot of people, the moral cause of gay marriage is crucial to their identity. They needed as a kind of faith, a moral compass. The loss of it leaves in anxious and confused. I want to treat that with due consideration, yet I would also ardently urge people to let the search for truth lead them where it will, even outside their comfort zone.
The scope of The Verdict of Reason is much larger than the subtitle would suggest, dealing with topics like promise keeping, human rights, evolution, tradition, and obviously family. Gay marriage isn't really the main theme, just the grain of sand in the oyster.
Social conservative themes are scattered through my other writings as well, mostly my blogs. My article "Why Premarital Sex is Wrong," at Public Discourse, provides a glimpse of the style of reasoning in The Verdict of Reason. This YouTube video encapsulates the argument.
Macroeconomics
My academic training is, above all, in economics. Most obviously, I have a PhD in economics from George Mason, but my Masters of Public Administration/International Development (MPA/ID) from Harvard was also heavily focused on economics. The idea was that development professionals need to know economics at a PhD level, but don't need to write a dissertation , and Harvard's program was designed as a place where they could do that.
Most of my jobs, and my best known writings, apply economics, in the core sense, but do not contribute to it. Yet I actually am an economic theorist, even if I've never had much impact in that capacity. It's hard to find a niche where one can write economic theory. I'll explain below why the academic journals are no good, but isn't there some popular outlet that would take an interest? Well, maybe. My articles "The Christian Case for Global Capitalism," "The Market and the Macroeconomic Social Contract," "The Fruitful Fusionism of Frederick Bastiat," and "Bring Back the Gilded Age" are all somewhat theoretical. Even more so is my article "Calling the Keynesians' Bluff," published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2013.
But one is kept on a pretty tight leash by the limited appetite of a casual general readership for thinking hard. Paul Krugman, writing for the New York Times, has a knack for using the disclaimer "wonkish" whenever he starts to deploy serious economic theory. I'm often shocked by how low the bar is, how modest the theoretical ambition of a post can be before Krugman feels the need to warn readers lest they be alienated by the difficulty.
Let's back up a bit. What is theory, anyway? In essence, I'd say that it's any attempt to think really clearly at at least a mildly abstract level. It's distinct from empirics because thinking clearly is a different activity from observing. Theory isn't data collection, but making sense of the data, or just making sense. The "of the data" can drop into the background, because our minds are flooded with data from the moment we're born, and it supplies our means of talking with each other, so it doesn't need mentioning. But also, the word "data" has picked up some unfortunate connotations. Too many social scientists accept as data only things that can be packaged in a CSV file and inputted into regressions. But only a tiny fraction of people's experience can be translated into that format, and the translation often creates fatal biases. That's why always asking for data creates a kind of willful blindness. Good theory brings in data in a broader and wiser way than number crunching. It lets common sense and plausibility do a lot of the work in establishing truth.
So what is macroeconomics? It's an awkward category. It's almost, but not quite, too awkward a concept to be fit for use. But a definition can start with economic indicators.
GDP. Unemployment. Inflation. Stock market valuations. House prices. Real wages. Bankruptcy rates. Job vacancies. These can be tracked. They move up and down. Why? They are correlated in complicated ways, albeit imperfectly. Why? Can they be predicted? Efforts to do so are infamously error prone. Still, economists probably do, on average, foresee the future of the economy better than others, and that is tremendously valuable. Also, can the macroeconomy be managed? Why did the Great Depression happen? It seems too odd and senseless an event not to have been avoidable somehow. What should have been done? How can we make sure that nothing like that happens again? That is one great wellspring of macroeconomic thought.
The other starting point for macroeconomics is the wealth and poverty of nations. Why are some nations so rich, so abundant in jobs and goods and comfort and education and long life, while others are so poor? And why has much of mankind become so much richer than it was a few centuries ago, while other parts of the world are still as poor and miserable as in the darkest times of the past? And what can be done about that? And it's related to the other kind of macroeconomics because the explanations why rich economies tick up and down is surely related to the explanations why some countries are so much richer than others.
Now, after two graduate degrees in economics, some work for the World Bank, some years of teaching, some experience in public administration and a lot of thinking, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the answers to these questions, while the field of economics as a whole does not.
Maybe that sounds rather implausible, and/or rather arrogant. I think it isn't. And I have a silly parable to illustrate why.
The Parable of the Tapir, the Dwarf, and the Futile Talkers
Suppose there is a room full of people, and one animal, which they are trying to identify. It is, in fact, a tapir. Some in the room are aware of this, while others honestly mistake it for a zebra, a donkey, or something else.
Unfortunately, the discussion is not conducted very sensibly, because some odd rules of discourse prevail in this room.
First, it's considered unscientific to utter the letter "r," or any word containing it. Also, the letter "q" is forbidden, being offensive to some, and the letter "t" is considered too low-brow.
Second, there is a dwarf walking around the room with a whip, making everyone talk. The dwarf doesn't understand the discussion much, but he's eager to get the animal identified, and wants all the people in the room to work on the problem. So he applies his whip fiercely to anyone who is not talking, in order to make them work harder.
Terrified of the whip, almost all the people are desperately busy thinking of things that can be said without a violating the protocols. They can't hear one another talk since they are all talking.
Some talk pure irrelevances, or move their lips without sound. Usually that works to keep the dwarf at bay, since he is far below the level of the conversation, physically and intellectually, and the room is such a chaotic hubbub. But sometimes the dwarf's picks up some irrelevant chitchat, and Crack! goes the whip at once.
So the commonest expedient is to talk, and trying to stay somewhat relevant, and the easiest way to do that is to say the word "donkey," which is clearly relevant to the animal identification project, and has no forbidden letters. Moreover, it's much better than "zebra," which is further from the truth, and also has an unscientific "r." From overhearing the word donkey a lot, most of the discussants get a vague impression that there's an emerging consensus that the animal is a donkey. Others look for circumlocutions for "tapir," or simply blurt out the unfashionable word and let the chips fall where they may. The last are usually not overhead, but when they are, they cause general embarrassment for a moment, then are forgotten.
I think academic economics is a bit like that room. Tenure committees are the dwarf.
I would suggest that, in that imaginary room, it would not necessarily be arrogant to think you know what the animal is, even if the general consensus seems to be missing it. In the same way, if I understand the secret of the wealth of nations while the broader discipline of economics is missing it, that's not because I'm such a genius, but because academic discourses is so dysfunctional.
The Secret of the Wealth of Nations
Start with specialization and trade. There are lots of ways to get more productive if you focus on a narrow task. That includes both skill development, avoidance of time wasted, and investment in task-specific tools and machines. A big reason why some nations are so rich in other so poor is that rich nations have more well-developed and sophisticated networks of specialization and trade.
But the specialists can't capture all the extra value they create, and sometimes a decision to specialize enriches society while impoverishing the specialist individual. Specialization tends to put the specialist in a disadvantageous bargaining position, since he has an overabundance of some niche good or service, and stands in need of everything else. Markets can help here, by giving the specialist access to many purchasers of his niche product. Firms can help, too, by hiring or training specialists, and then ensuring through stable pay structures that specialists won't be punished by the terms of trade in the market.
Firms and markets, hierarchy and catallaxy, are opposites in some ways. But healthy capitalism uses both and finds a balance between them. I think it's helpful to compare them to the solid and liquid elements in a garden, where the elaborate structures of the plants depend on continual flows of water for their maintenance. Firms need markets, but sometimes markets need firms in return. Firms and markets both mediate specialization and trade, and they are both, in general, much superior alternatives to self-sufficiency.
"Institutions," a ubiquitous but vague term, do come into the argument at this point. They have nothing to do with liberal democracy. They have a good deal to do with property rights, but their essential role is to mediate the division of labor to allow for a lot of specialization.
But virtue is even more useful. If there's one thing I'd change about economics, it might be the traditional assumption that people are "rational" in a sense that includes being narrowly self-interested. Ethics is not only real and a major influence on people's conduct, but frequently indispensable to making both markets and organizations work. This is easy to show with little bit of game theory.
Anyway, if you think of the state of technology as the set of products, services, and techniques that are available to society, specialization is a crucial part of how the technology space is explored and exploited. Suppose there are 10,000 known technologies, which require 10,000 jobs for their implementation. A society of 1,000 people cannot fully exploit the technology space. Under these circumstances, the 10,001st technology will probably not be worth inventing. It may be forgotten if it is invented. A society of 20,000 probably won't fully exploit it either, though it will come closer. But perhaps society with 500,000 or 1 million or 2 million people can almost fully exploit the technology space, if markets and organizations can mediate enough specialization and trade among them.
Invention adds new goods and services, consumer or intermediate, or services, or techniques, to the arsenal of human know-how. If a country is already failing to exploit the existing technologies, then it might not help much to add more options to the underutilized technological arsenal. Invention is most rewarding in a cutting-edge economy that thoroughly exploits all available technological options.
To make this clearer would require a lengthier and more technical exposition. I haven't quite written that, but this presentation, entitled "Promethean Economics: The Exploration and Exploitation of the Space of Technological Possibilities," is a preview. I presented it at Mercatus three years ago, and made a YouTube video afterwards, not so much for anyone else's benefit as to remember the ideas myself. Reinventing Economics is another incomplete introduction to this way of thinking. And my dissertation, Complexity, Competition, and Growth: Key Ideas from Adam Smith, Modeled Using Agent-Based Simulation, is crucial backstory. I carried my dissertation models further as an assistant professor: this YouTube video gives a glimpse of how far I got. Others have similar ideas: see From Poverty to Prosperity: Intangible Assets, Hidden Liabilities and the Lasting Triumph over Scarcity and Xiaokai Yang's Economics: New Classical Versus Neoclassical Frameworks.
Quickly, on "business cycles." I've become more sympathetic to the concept of stimulus then I was in "Calling the Keynesians' Bluff," while still being critical of the models that I attack there. I'm still skeptical of Obama era stimulus. I think the reason stimulus worked in the COVID pandemic was that the government got round its own bureaucratic inefficiency by mostly just giving away money to the citizenry.
I have my own mental model of a business cycles that I'd like to write down sometime. Meanwhile, I've come to think optimal inflation is higher than it used to be, more like 4% than 2%. The pandemic gave us an excuse to do the right thing, and we started repairing the macroeconomic social contract. But at the time of writing, the Fed has raised interest rates too much, and we're at risk of falling back into the 2010s stagnation, which is quite avoidable and would be quite unfortunate.
I mentioned "The Global Economic Impact of Open Borders" above as part of immigration advocacy, but it's also a work of macroeconomics, featuring a kind of data-driven model of the world economy, as a basis for extrapolating what would happen if migration controls were eliminated.
Before leaving this topic, I should mention a book I was roped into co-authoring back in 2009, entitled Economic Contractions in the United States: A Failure of Government. It's a curmudgeonly "free market" response to the 2008 financial crisis. The revisionist history of the Great Depression is a decent corrective to the usual Keynesian New Deal fairy tale. But I wouldn't say it has any particularly ingenious policy advice for the leaders of the West in the face of the Great Recession. At one point shortly before publication, I asked to have my name removed, but was offered a day to revise it at will to make it acceptable to my intellectual scruples, so I took the deal and my name stayed in the byline. I don't really consider it part of my oeuvre, but there are some continuities.
The Mental Sinkhole of the Academic Journals
Now let me turn to a sad topic.
It's always depressing to think about the academic journals. So much waste! I've seen enough of the world to know that the marginal value of social product of intellectually skilled labor can be very high at the right time and place. It's far lower in academic publishing than in public administration, entrepreneurship, or probably just about any other application. Nowhere else does so much brainpower do so little good.
You can think of the academic journals as a dead genre that maintains a zombie-like momentum through massive backhanded subsidies. The motive isn't truth, but tenure. The readership consists, first, of peer reviewers and other academics guessing who they need to cite, and second and more importantly, the algorithms that rank impact in order to feed the decision processes of committees who will make tenure decisions without ever reading, being able to understand, or substantively caring about scholars' work. Everyone can make the world a better place by putting an end to this. Don't write for them! Don't edit them! Don't peer review for them!
Economists' habit of reducing people's motives to self-interest is a damaging oversimplification, But it's true that you can often get insight about how systems work, and the outcomes they produce, by identifying and reasoning from the self-interested motives of the people involved. With that in mind, what incentives does an academic peer reviewer face?
First, his time is valuable, yet he's not being paid. He wants to spend his little of it as he can. So, no difficult arguments please!
Second, he wants citations for himself and his friends. Citation is the currency of academic fame, and even more, of academic job security.
Third, he wants praise, confirmation, influence. Agree with him, thank him, support him, and he's happy. Some peer reviewers might like some kinds of criticism, too. The best is if you add a nuance to his ideas that he saw perfectly well but didn't have time to write down. Save him some labor.
Fundamental criticism, though, is not appreciated by peer reviewers. They have to work hard to understand it, and then it undermines, or perhaps completely demolishes, the value of their work.
And so all the energy of the academic rat race conspires to incentivize mediocre, unambitious, excessively deferential little works, full of citation bribery, which are not worth reading.
To be fair, I'd estimate that maybe 10% of what is published in academic journals, maybe more, is worthwhile-ish for some purpose or other. Even bad institutions don't corrupt everybody. The most useful work just crunches numbers to establish stylized facts. The academic journals sometimes provide a home for that where it would otherwise be hard to place.
But the vast majority of what is written is either trivial or false, in ways that only academia's stultifying overspecialization and obfuscatory jargon makes possible. It's kept afloat by the rather uncritical esteem that educated society still largely has for professors, although that seems to be fortunately eroding. The parable of the emperor's new clothes is very applicable to contemporary academia. I've written about that in "The Decadence of Economics," and in the first post of Reinventing Economics, entitled "Why Economists Should Be More Like Philosophers."
With that said, let me mention my one conventionally peer reviewed, somewhat well placed article.
"Islam's Democracy Paradox: Muslims Claim to Like Democracy, So Why Do They Have So Little?" (Rowley, Charles K., and Nathanael Smith. "Islam’s democracy paradox: Muslims claim to like democracy, so why do they have so little?." Public Choice 139 (2009): 273-299.) shows that Muslim countries have less democracy, and it's not because of their relative poverty or oil wealth. It's true and important, but a chart and a blog post would suffice to make the point. The article really has no reason to exist.
The funny thing is that it has nothing to do with economics, really, yet I wrote it, instead of many of the things I cared about more and was more qualified to write about, because it was a smart move on the path to being a professor of economics! For a long time now, economists have been "imperialistic" and written about many topics far removed from money and markets and prices, topics usually considered someone else's domain. This used to be justified by saying that economists' peculiar mental toolkit of supply, demand, trade-offs, optimization, and market equilibrium was applicable outside the domain of markets and prices and money. Fair enough.
But "Islam's Democracy Paradox: Muslims Claim to Like Democracy, So Why Do They Have So Little?" doesn't use economic reasoning. It's a strictly statistical exercise. It shouldn't really be job market currency for an aspiring economics professor. But hiring committees aren't expected to read your stuff, they just look at citation counts for articles in qualifying journals. And an article on Islam and democracy is non-threatening to the core of the field.
It has 162 citations, but I've never had a conversation about the article with anyone since it was published, either in person or online. I feel a little guilty about those citations. Dear citers, if you're reading this, I'm sorry not to be able to return the favor with any practical support! I'm not active in the academic publishing scene these days, and can't cite you in return. I'm afraid that taking the trouble to cite my article may not have been a good investment. I hope you didn't take more time out of your schedule than what it takes you read the title and abstract. Probably you didn't.
Should it be surprising that the academic journals are such a swamp of futility? Maybe not, if you think about history. Most societies have some stupid customs, and the academic journals are probably no sillier than 18th-century wigs or Chinese foot binding. Intelligentsias in particular tend to get into a rut and keep echoing the same ideas for generations, so that posterity often concludes that whole generations produced no scholarship worth remembering. Intellectual history is centuries of dross punctuated by flowerings of genius.
The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were extra-academic intellectual movements that largely disdained the universities of their own times. We need that again.
Neo-Medieval Globalism
Now, in spite of my low opinion of the academic journals as a genre, I wrote a good deal of material in hopes of publishing in the academic journals before I realized that I shouldn't, and some of it I like pretty well. It's posted at my SSRN page. Don't read it at all, but I highly recommend some is what's there, such as "From Printing Press to Nation-State, from Internet to Neo-Medieval Globalism." This one was actually published in the "Pacific Journal," a staff-authored publication of the university I was teaching in at the time, so it's peer-reviewed in a sense, though I don't think it counts for the impact factors and whatnot that tenure committees judge by (but don't take my word for that, I've never mastered all those arcana).
"Neo-Medieval Globalism" scrutinizes history, identity, and politics, through the lens of the economics of the production of distribution of text, as determined by underlying technology, leading to a distinctive analysis of the present and some striking predictions for the future. Technologically, the manuscript gave way to printing starting in the late 15th century, and printing begin giving away to the internet starting in the 1990s. Both technological revolutions made text dramatically more abundant. Printing led to modernity and nationalism. What will the internet lead to?
I argue that in certain crucial ways, the internet era actually resembles the manuscript era. Critical to the print era was the peculiar form of economies of scale embodied in the "print run," involving a high fixed cost, followed by very low marginal cost, to produce identical copies of a particular text. Texts which could not sell enough to cover the fixed cost were not produced at all, causing a truncation of the "long tail" in the statistical distribution of texts by expected readership, a kind of financial censorship of niche and specialty voices, whom the internet has unleashed. Also, the internet sharply reduces the cost of storage and distribution of text relative to the cost of production of text, increasing the potential geographic reach and durability even of minor texts. Text is more participatory, and there is more intertextuality, with bloggers playing a role comparable to that of medieval glossators.
The new economics of text in the internet age is making the human conversation, and with it people's sense of imagined community, at once more nichefied and more globalized, as it was in the Middle Ages. Structures of sovereignty are stubborn and backward-looking features of human history, but ultimate power is stable, legitimate and popular when it aligns with people's imagined communities so that it can enjoy consent of the governed. As the internet reorganizes human communities, nation-states will become less cohesive and popular, and reactionary nationalisms, though often resorted to as a refuge from uncertainty and change, will become increasingly cynical and uncreative. I think the years since I wrote that 2015 article underscore the creeping, inexorable bankruptcy of nationalism in the internet age.
One other academic article style work that I'd like to rescue from oblivion is "The Economics of Monasticism." It uses a theoretical model which mixes the conventional and the innovative to explain why monastic communities centered around the worship motive have sprung up again and again, spontaneously, and proven strikingly stable over time. More than that, monasteries are society's based on social contract in a way that liberal democracies never have been, in spite of sometimes being justified by that ideological construct. Principles of a Free Society borrows that theme in chapter 10.
I think "The Economics of Monasticism" gets to the heart of the perennial appeal and historical impact of the Benedict Option. Someday I'd like to expand it into a book entitled The Lantern of Christendom, documenting and explaining the lives and enormous contributions of monks, nuns, monasteries and convents through all the Christian centuries.
Other Writings
As I come across other writings that I forgot to include in the above, I'll put them here.
UPDATE: Just added the link for “The Economics of Monasticism.” Missed it before.