A Lull

Sleepsong by Secret Garden

Today marks the 11th anniversary of the first post on this blog. I have written an anniversary post every year since then:

1. A Year in the Life of a Supply-Side Liberal

2. Three Revolutions

3. Beacons

4. Why I Blog

5. My Objective Function

6. A Barycentric Autobiography

7. Crafting Simple, Accurate Messages about Complex Problems

8. On Human Potential

9. Pandemic Passage: My Past 12 Months in Blogging

10. Everything is Changing

This past year has been a lull in my blogging. My research on well-being with Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Kristen Cooper and an able team of RAs (see “Pushing Aside GDP for a Measure of Human Well-Being Turns Out to be Very, Very Difficult. Ask Dan Benjamin”) has heated up, and in my personal life, a move from a suburb of Boulder into Boulder —and other similarly arduous but benign changes just as important—have taken up a lot of my time. I plan to write an autobiography as soon as I retire; I’ll give the full story then.

Despite not putting a high priority on blogging this past year after an intense decade of blogging before that, I count 26 posts, interviews or tweetstorms this past year that are substantial and not just a pointer to someone else’s work. Here they are, in reverse chronological order:

• Because Genes of a Child are Random Given the Genes of the Parents, It is a Lot Easier to Tell If Genes Cause Diabetes than to Tell If Crime Causes Diabetes

• Placebos Can Work Even When People Know They Are Placebos

• Posts Useful for Teaching (bibliographic post)

• Miles, Brad DeLong and Noah Smith: Hexapodia Podcast #1

• How Having Negative Interest Rate Policy in Its Toolkit Would Make the Fed Braver in Confronting Inflation with Needed Rate Hikes—A Tweetstorm

• A Wide-Ranging and Thorough Interview of Miles by K. V. Krishna

• Miles's Tweetstorm of Favorite Passages from Noah Smith's Review of Brad DeLong's book ‘Slouching Towards Utopia’

• Miles's Tweet Storm on Interpersonal Comparison of Utility

• Nominal Illusion: Are People Understanding Real Versus Nominal Interest Rates?

• Brad DeLong Confirms that Not Having Negative Interest Rate Policy in the Monetary Policy Toolkit Makes People Afraid of Vigorous Rate Hikes to Control Inflation

• Donald Yacovone: How Ubiquitous History Textbooks Taught White Supremacy

• Current Information Provision is Inadequate: Let's Put Salient Warnings on Alcoholic Beverages

• How a Toolkit Lacking a Full Strength Negative Interest Rate Option Led to the Current Inflationary Surge

• An Example of Needing to Worry about Reverse Causality: Satisfaction with Aging and Objective Aging Outcomes

• A Linear Model for the Effects of Diet and Exercise on Health is a Big Advance over Popular Thinking

• Mitra Kalita asks Miles Kimball, Cecilia Rouse and Daniel Zhou about the Coming Recession

• What David Laibson and Andrei Shleifer are Teaching for Behavioral Economics—Jeffrey Ohl

• Some Low-Hanging Fruit for Government Policy: Paying Benefits and Wages to Low-Income Folks Weekly

• Defending Jordan Peterson

• Miles's Personality in 10 Facets of the Big Five

• With a Cobb-Douglas Production Function, the Differential Equation for the Solow Growth Model has a Closed-Form Solution—Tsering Sherpa and Miles Kimball

• Price Stickiness Endangers Scientific Experiments Using Helium

• Gradually Growing Sophistication in How Colleges are Evaluated

• The Federalist Papers #55: How Big Should the House of Representatives Be?

• Is Student Debt Forgiveness Fair?

• A Flexiblog

Statistical interpretation and monetary policy are continuing themes. My favorite of all of these pieces is the Hexapodia podcast with Brad DeLong and Noah Smith.

Unfortunately, the next year looks very crowded for me as well. At some point, I hope to get out of the woods and then restart this blog on Substack.