Having published by 40th essay on this site last week, I’m taking another month-long break to recharge and make plans for a bit of a makeover.
First, some background. This blog started as an idea for a book. I made the effort to write up a proposal to see what it would look like, but I came away feeling much more confident about the questions I was asking than the answers I was offering. So I decided that thinking out loud on Substack was the best way to proceed, allowing me to explore questions in depth and consider possible answers while still entertaining doubts.
That turned out to be a great decision. Over the past year, I’ve been able to work through and develop my thoughts with the benefit of helpful, ongoing feedback from intelligent, engaged readers. And rather than trying to come up with the one best way of constructing an argument, I’ve had the luxury of looking at problems from many different angles and and through many different intellectual lenses. From a purely selfish perspective, it’s been a great way to sharpen and clarify my own thinking, and I’ve been gratified to see my efforts resonate with a growing audience.
I’ve now published what amounts to a book-length treatment of the ideas that made it into that original book proposal. There’s still a great deal more to say — with both a closer look at current problems and, especially, a more in-depth treatment of promising developments and trends that point the way to a better future.
But I now consider the initial phase of this blog to be concluded. With the essays to date, I’ve constructed a basic intellectual framework for thinking about capitalism’s problems in the 21st century and possible ways to surmount them. I’ll now use this framework to look at both problems and possibilities in greater detail.
I’m going to proceed a bit differently in this new phase. I’m no longer going to try to keep up a weekly publishing schedule; instead, I plan to scale back to something like one essay a month. In addition, though, I want to start a podcast, available here and elsewhere, so I can engage other smart people I know or would like to know and get them to work through all the many facets of the permanent problem with me. I hope to do about one interview a month, and I intend to make written transcripts available so that people who, like me, prefer print to audio can follow along.
See you in about a month.
I hope you will consider reading Charles Marohn's book Strong Towns and possibly interviewing him on your podcast. He and the Strong Towns organization have much to add to the discussion about finding meaning and prosperity by rejecting top-down approaches and embracing localism.
"I’ve now published what amounts to a book-length treatment of the ideas that made it into that original book proposal."
How about assembling the essays into a compilation book? Or are you going to begin from scratch and re-write? Risk & Progress is in the middle of a significant reshuffle now as well, I am organically building a book that will be roughly 300 pages in length.