A year ago, Economic Principals began writing monthly rather than weekly, in hopes of finishing a book. Finish EP did not. He threw in the towel last month to his patient and gracious editor. There had been bumps in the road: Covid, untimely deaths, funding difficulties, gradually failing eyesight. In the end, there was no one to blame but himself.
Also last month, an unexpected wave of annual subscription arrived, seemingly, out of the blue. More than a few of them must have been foisted by the automatic renewal machine. EP had forgotten that he moved to Substack in July instead of December, when the annual fund-drive traditionally took place. Those founding subscriptions were written midsummer, yet EP planned to stop writing at the end of December, after giving plenty of warning to underwriters who might otherwise be tempted to renew.
What to do?
EP’s most valuable assets have always been its once-a-week Sunday morning routine (EST) and its name. Midnight delivery online makes the column timely for European and Asia-Pacific readers alike. The EP name serves as a tolerable description of what the newspaper column had about: “masters and mavericks of modern economics,” in Peter Dougherty’s phrase.
In those days, Cambridge, Mass. was the undisputed capital of world economics, and The Boston Globe sold 805,000 copies on Sunday. After moving online, EP folded his second weekly newspaper column into the mix, and the flag at the top of the page became “A Weekly Column about Economics and Politics, formerly of The Boston Globe, Independent since 2002.”
For the rest of this year, EP will resume writing weekly. There’s something worth having in the reminder that it’s Sunday again. That span of time feells like a metronome. A montlIt can feel Many dispatches will revolve around free-standing passages from the draft of the unfinished book. Brevity may be may be welcome other Sundays. Together, the package comes close to what recent subscribers are paying for.
EP plans to write one last Sunday item on December 28. After that, he’ll close EP’s world headquarters in Somerville’s Ball Square and, after 42 years as a columnist, become a civilian again.