Hundreds of Posts I Haven't Written Yet
Or, how to seem more creative.
In high school, I was clearly dumber than my four best friends.
In my Princeton Ph.D. program, I considered my intelligence average at best.
Yet I basically never met anyone who seemed more creative than me. I have far more ideas than even the most workaholic version of myself could ever actually write up. New ideas come so quickly that I’m in grave danger of forgetting most of them.
Which is why I rush to write my ideas down lest they be lost forever.
Isn’t that distracting? Sure, but I usually just jot down a title. If you want get the most out of your creativity, I highly recommend the practice. Create a queue of original ideas worth exploring. If, in hindsight, your idea sucks, let it languish. No one will ever find out.
I know, I know: “I’m so creative” sounds like pathetic braggadocio. Perhaps I delude myself, so judge for yourself. Below is a list of titles of blog posts I never got around to writing between 2005 and 2022. For about 20%, I’m hazy on what the post was even supposed to be about. Doh! I should have added a subtitle.
P.S. If there are any titles you’d especially like me to complete, please inform me in the comments.
I’ve Got a Little List… of Unwritten Blog Posts
Regulatory Conspiracy
Telling Privilege from “Privilege”
The 57-Year Slope
Naming Names
Social Media and the Comics Code
Total Resistance
Thanks for Less Than Nothing
All I’m Asking
Priming the Pipeline
The Mask of Dissonance
CPI Bias Update
If Lockdowns Aren’t Terrible…
Traditional Norms Versus Moral Equivalence
The Libertarian Crisis
Doing Nothing Would Have Been Better
How Affirmative Action Ends Test Bias
If the Welfare State Is So Small, Can We Just Get Rid of It?
Work or Starve
Exceptional Stealing
Above My Pay Grade: The Stages of Business Ethics
Systemic Judaism?
How to Convince Me of Things
Czech Scraps
Balance for Austerity
Hard to Bet
“Diversity and Inclusion”: Authoritarian for Now
Ephemeral Externalities
The Value of Decongestion
The Righteous Scofflaw: COVID ion
Explaining the Feminization of Education
The Mixed Bag of International Cooperation
Capitalism: Winners and Losers
Social Desirability Bias: Between Impulse and Reason
Arbitrage is Overrated
Mormons
The Profitability of Cancel Culture
The Conservation of Condemnation
Building vs. Crime
No One Cared About My Spreadsheets
My Guidelines for Government
How to Sell Human Challenge Trials
What Field of Study Is This?
The Non-Central Fallacy Fallacy
Ill-Will
Bigotry: The Slippery Slope
I Have Your Back: Reflections on Cooperative Civil Disobedience
What Do Government Monopsonies Do? The Case of the COVID Vaccine
The New Kosher
Less Than Zero: The Blight of Vacancy
A Century of San Francisco Skyscrapers
Baumol and Housing
The Period of Contrition
Meritocracy: Critique of a Defense
The Lessons of Vietnam: A Dialogue
What Have RCTs Done for Prosperity?
You Can Handle the Truth: Both Sides Are Bad
What It’s Like to Be a Political Atheist
Lines in the Sand
Culture, Behavior, Attitudes
Immigration, Natalism, and Free Lunches
Risk Reciprocity
Sjyllabus of Errors [not a typo!]
Error Type and Reticence
Contact Tracing and Economic Knowledge
Literally Irrational, Figuratively Sick
Unrequited Nationalism
Discrimination and the Profession: A Socratic Dialogue
Picoscopic Harms
Hurtful Accusations
Cut the Police: The Logic of Austerity
What’s the Plan?
The Ethics of Minding Your Own Business
Running an Intellectual Kangaroo Court
The Coming Incumbent Bloodbath?
Teaching Foreign Language Teaching
9/11 and Corona
Privacy and the Spotlight Effect
We’ve Got Each Other
This Can’t Fail in the Short-Run
The Ship and the Island
The Honest Case for Prohibition
Stay the Course
Signaling, Immigration, and the Fallacy of Composition
How Poor Are the Uninsured?
Stampedes and Social Proof
Deplorable Democracy
Who Has Dual Dominance?
A Matter of Life and Death
Helping the Poor: The Great Distraction
“Education” or Else
Easterly, Growth, Policy, and Priors
In a Civilized Society: A Socratic Dialogue
Homeschooling Update
Amazing Decisions – or Amazing Overstatement?
Don’t Distract Me
Consequentialism For Me, Deontology for Thee
The Ungrateful
Spotting Populism
Cosmopolitanism and Capitalism
The Spanish Labor Market: The Competitive Fringe
Doesn’t Much Matter or Doesn’t Much Differ
Hedonic News Maximization
Child Poverty: The Strange Rungs of Anger
Some Hindsight on Unintended Consequences
A Test of Economic Reasoning
The World Is Unrecognizable
What’s Wrong With Marginal Politics
The Horror of Paperwork
Statists Never Say They’re Sorry
Multiplicative Merit
Government Regulation: A Litany of Woe
Government Spending: A Litany of Waste
Call Out Ideas
Unwelcome Common Sense
Above the Fray
My Problem Is More Important Than Your Problem
True Socialism and True Nationalism
Socialism Was Born Bad: The Venezuelan Case
Tell Someone Who Cares
Mental Bordering
Petty Problems vs. Action Bias
LCDs: Poverty vs. Interest
The Bully of Arbitrary Deploring
Transcending Pseudo-Tolerance
Rethinking Economic Refugees
Grievance Studies: The Self-Referential Critique
Weyl’s Trade-Off
Antipathy and Self-Pity
Nationalism Twists Your Soul
Nationalism: Not for Me, Not for Thee
How’s Latin Doing?
A Reading from the Book of Becker
The Failure of Utilitarianism
College as Trickle-Down
The Mannerly Realms
The Case Against Education: The Public Choice Case for Cuts
The Revelation of Bigotry
The Vice of Nationalism
It’s Not Bigotry
The Empirical Radical
Water Runs Uphill Both Ways
Cultural Minimalism
Distributing the Doubling
Two Immigration Agendas
The Top Two Cop-Outs of Moral Philosophy
Insights of Mark Krikorian
Deregulation Is Regulation
The Boy Who Cried Racism
The Road to Statism
It’s Really Conscious
All Roads Lead to Open Borders
College: A Great Missed Opportunity
Group X
Terrorism by the Numbers
The Straussian Time Bomb
Prestige: How Immigration Works Wonders
Holding Out for Freedom
What You Say Is Plausible
The Far Bias
Open Borders and Occupation
A Real Denunciation Deficit?
Dead Inside
Common Sense or Conventional Wisdom?
Wasteful Perceptions
Scott Alexander and Monty Python
Drop-Dead Exploitation
The Puffery of Violence
Galton, Hitler, and Conquest: The Ominous Parallels
The Relevant Margins: A Belated Reply to Cowen on Signaling and Human Capital
Edifying: The Boston Three on Subprime Facts
Dorm Room Philosophy
Immigration as the Rosetta Stone of Political Morality
Matt Yglesias, Market Fundamentalist? The Case of Organic Food
The Hollow Core: A Critique
Infant Amnesia vs. the Power of Early Environment
Don’t Be Hasty: Why Left-Libertarians Must Rethink Their Empirics
How the Soviet Collapse Made the Soviet People Safer
How My Views on Female Unemployment Were 20 Years Out of Date
Singapore: Contracyclical Tax Cuts Done Right
Why The Next Version of My Book Won’t Be Kleinian
The Road to Hell Was Paved With Bad Intentions
Why Are Women Doing So Well in the Labor Market?
How Coarse is the Signal?
47 Ways to Cut Education Spending
How My Books Fit Together
“More Than We Thought”
The Soundest Unconvincing Arguments of All Time
Lessons of the Anti-Hero
Blame Identity Politics, Not “Heterogeneity”
Power Hunger: The Silent Motive
Bastiat and Kahneman: A Case of Consilience
Ignorance Is Not Power
Robin’s Psychology of Technology
An Imaginary Realignment
Define Narrowly, Punish Harshly
The Terror of Terror
Is Education Good for the Soul?
Poverty: Who To Blame
How I Homeschooled
How Bad Was the King of Siam?
Consciousness: The O-Ring Presumption
Consol Refi and the Liquidity Trap
Homeschooling So Far
The Prudence of Unilateral Scrupulousness
Lucas on Cost-Benefit Analyses of Global Warming
WWF as Safe Space
Disavowal Day
Against Offense
The Great Dehumanizations
The Question of the Very Long Run
The Great Blockade
Labor Monopoly By Superior Efficiency?
Status Emulation vs. Conformity
What About Bugs?
Status and Peer Effects
The Case for Grilling
Preaching Against Preaching
Competition Policy
The Value of Delaying Disaster
Resistance and Backlash
Philosophical Anxiety
Moral Reasoning: Literal versus Analogical
What Is the Case Against Child Labor?
Potential Means-Testing
Public vs. Private: What I See
The Naive Apostate
EITC Meets the Myopic Empiricism of the Minimum Wage
Common-Sense Morality versus Left-Libertarianism
Socially Skeptical
Civil Liberties and Weak Deontology
Tell Me What You See
We Need Regulation
Something Could Happen
The Envy of Liberals and the Bigotry of Conservatives
What Motivates Conservatives: My Best Guess
What Motivates Liberals: My Best Guess
The Paper Tiger of Political Correctness
Reading Intentions
Jean Valjean
Hollywood: The Unintentional Agenda
Social Security and Generational Equality
Thresholds of Responsibility
A Tale of Two-Tier Tolls
Who Called Ukraine?
How Many Times Do I Have to Say It?
Would You Stand Alone?
Supply, Demand, and the Cargo Cult of Price
War Socialism vs. The Survive/Thrive Theory
Alexander and Labor
I Love the Hold-Out Problem
Confessions of a Libertarian Know-It-All
Reboot
The Haidtian Objectivist
Why Otherwise Reasonable People Don’t Drink My Kool-Aid
I’ll Take My Chances
Loyalty Above All
Silver Linings
Salvaging the Intention Heuristic
Exclusion and Antipathy
The Golden Mean of Nationalism
The Presumptuous Nationalist
A Hardy Weed: How Left-Libertarians Underestimate the Free Market
Openness to Awesomeness
Is Price Protection A Big Bad Conspiracy?
The Buffer Zone
What the 12 Steps Ought to Be
A Tale of Two Tribes
Moral Nihilism: A Socratic Dialogue
Rothbard on Immigration
The Evils of Nativism [finite version]
The Marital Return to Education: The Case of Women
The Hyperbole of Survival
Francis, Yglesias, and Dr. Horrible
Two Steps Down
Dependency Theory in Reverse: How the First World Really is to Blame for Third World Poverty
The Immigration-Libertarian Connection
Who Would Win a Global Culture War?
The Top Pro-Market Social Science Economists Don’t Know
Dehumanization
Your Society is Probably Evil
Bystanders Are My People
The Ethics and Repugnance of Harm Reduction
The Unlikely Scenario
The Sexy Factor: A 20-Year Retrospective
A Litany of Disappointment
Media Scandals Are Viruses
Voltaire on Diversity
Of Ems and Immigrants
@Bryan, I’d love to hear more about how you homeschooled and how it’s going so far. There were a couple titles along those lines
I’d love to hear what systemic Judaism is about. And a homeschooling update!