Back in April

I've decided to pause the blog for the rest of this month and return in April. I took a month off in December after writing my first ten essays; having now written another ten, another break feels in order. I think this may end up being something of a regular pattern.

Writing here at The Permanent Problem has been a great experience so far. Substack is extremely user-friendly, and the essay format is liberating — no need to worry about news hooks or word counts, just say what's on your mind in the number of words it takes to say it. And it's been so gratifying to build an audience and get regular and highly intelligent feedback from readers. I started this blog as an experiment; I'm now far enough along to declare that, from my perspective at least, it's been a great success.

But writing a new, lengthy essay every week takes a lot of time and effort. (Note: if I tried to make the essays shorter, that would be even more time-consuming.) Just wrestling my thoughts onto the page is laborious, as I've never been a facile writer. Plus I'm writing on big, sprawling topics that often veer far away from subjects I've written about before, so trying my best to avoid saying something stupid or omit something important adds to the challenge. Finally, I do make an effort to write not just clearly and intelligently, but with a bit of style as well. Well-crafted sentences that roll off your tongue if you say them out loud — I hope there are at least a couple in every essay.

So with the effort that this project requires of me, I have to spend at least some time on it seven days a week, and even then I gradually start falling behind on both my other responsibilities at the Niskanen Center as well as my to-do list in real life. Accordingly, regular breaks look like a necessity to keep this thing sustainable over the longer term. 

Let me close with a little preview of coming attractions. Up to now the blog has been focused on problems, describing 21st century capitalism's simultaneous crises of dynamism, inclusion, and politics. I plan to wrap up this initial survey in the next couple of essays, and then I’ll pivot to at least an initial exploration of possibilities for transcending these crises and rising to the challenge of the permanent problem. This to me is the main point of the blog, and everything I've written so far has been to set the stage for that exploration. If I didn't have what I consider to be promising ideas for how to move forward, if all I had to offer was just a catalog of our current difficulties, I wouldn't have started the blog. The point isn't to wallow in our current malaise; the point is to look for a way out.

Before I go too far in exploring constructive possibilities, though, I want to spend a while homing in on what I think success looks like. I describe this blog’s subject matter as the messy transition from material plenty to widespread flourishing, but I’ve yet to say much about what I think flourishing entails. I thus plan to devote some time to fleshing out my views on what it means to “live wisely and agreeably and well.”

At any rate, such is my present sense of the road ahead. It won’t be possible to keep this going indefinitely, but for now this blog is making a sustained, coherent argument in serial form. I have a general picture in mind of that overall argument — as I’ve mentioned, this project started off as an idea for a book — but when it comes to specific essay topics, I rarely can see farther than two or three essays ahead. So don’t hold me too closely to the agenda I’ve sketched: it’s entirely possible that in the course of writing an essay, I’ll discover some rabbit hole I need to descend and root around in before getting back on track.

OK, that’s all for now. Thank you again for your attention, and I look forward to reconnecting next month.