Phase Change

Economic Principals goes monthly.

I have been writing once a week for forty years, and if I weren’t writing a book about some of the changes in economics that have occurred over that time, I’d keep writing it.  Instead, I’ll wrap up the weekly in order to finish the book.

The first twenty years were easy. With a thoroughly heterodox book – The Idea of Economic Complexity -- behind me, I began writing EP in 1993, as a column in the Sunday Boston Globe. There was a newsroom of 500 or so talented reporters and  editors, generous travel, and access to economists and fringe players of all sorts,  I covered Boston economics from Chicago, the San Francisco Bay area, and Washington, D.C. A  collection of columns followed in 1992:  Economic Principals: Masters and Mavericks of Modern Economics. The year after that, The New York Times bought the Globe, and took control in 2001, with new plans for the paper. I moved online in 2002.

The second twenty years were more difficult. There was no boisterous newsroom in which to exchange information. I depended on economists to fill me in. On a fellowship in Berlin, I finished Knowledge and the Wealth Nations: A Story of Economic Discovery.  about Paul Romer and the obstacles he faced with his contribution to growth theory.  Romer shared a Nobel Prize with William Nordhaus in 2018. 

I expected to write  a sequel, but certain aspects of the 2008 crisis seemed a better story. I switched topics in 2010, but in 2016, my editor, whom I revered, told me that “nobody wants another book about the crisis.” He was right. I changed topics a third time and began the book I am finishing now.

Between times, I self-published, clumsily, a little book about privatization in Russia: Because They Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Enlargement) after Twenty-Five Years. Despite the lack of a title page,, it proved to be prescient, in more ways than one; Janet Yellen was appointed Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, instead of Lawrence Summers.

Somewhere around 2005,  I adopted a public broadcasting model, in which a relative few subscribers pay for a relative many to read. I also added a new word to EP’s masthead, “politics”,  as in A weekly newsletter about economics and politics, formerly a column of the Boston Globe, independent since 2002. EP had become a weekly now, no longer a newspaper column.

It had become more difficult to write about economics week after week. Sources preferred to talk to a newspaper. I read five daily  papers, The Economist,  Science, and Foreign Affairs. I had strong opinions, and I was good at finding unusual angles.

And so it has been.  After moving to Substack in 2022, I added some detail to the circumstances surrounding John Kerry’s 1996 re-election to the US Senate in 1996, and the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans brouhaha, but otherwise, things didn’t change much.

I give up the weekly edition of EP with mixed emotions. It was that or risk missing my deadline for an interesting book.  I had several projects in the works for the weekly.  I’ll carry them out in  the new monthly edition, in greater depth. Stay with it and you’ll always know when it is the first of the month, starting in June.

With profound gratitude, I thank the Globe editors who put EP in business, Lincoln Millstein, Matthew Storin, and Michael Janeway; its copy editors over the years, Mark Feeney and Richard Pitkin;  and, especially, the subscribers who it going all these years.

Although top-flight economics today is practiced all over the world, especially in the United Kingdom, its ancestral home, Boston remains capital of the profession, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.  It has been a privilege to write Economics Principals, and to look forward to more to come.