In June 2019, on a sunny summer afternoon, I sat alone in my mother's house in the countryside. She and my stepdad were away at work, and professionally I was in this weird-middling segment not quite knowing what tha hell I was up to.
I had been accepted to a PhD program in economics but deferred, having started to realize that academia was not where I wanted to spend my days. I had been on a few job interviews for various fiat jobs I couldn't have cared less for, but mostly spent my days reading books and articles, drawing down my savings, and thinking about economicsy stuff.
That spring I began publishing more regularly, averaging something like 3 articles a month, plus a scholarly publication in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics ("Book Review: Capitalism in America: A History, by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan.").
Later that summer, I went to the AIER campus in Massachusetts to lead a colloquium on money and monetary economics for undergrads.
I had proofread a book manuscript for one of my Oxford professors as well, but was otherwise kind of lost.
It was this afternoon session at the kitchen table in my mother's house when I first realized that this is what I'm meant to be doing. There had been some article ideas floating around in my head, as they always do, but suddenly they just exploded out of me. In 3-4 hours that I cannot account for—my stepdad had come home, said hi, and went outside to mow the lawn; I had no recollection of any of that—I produced:
- Non-Renewable Resources Never Really Run Out
- Social Pressure vs. Consumer Preferences, and
- You May Be Biased — But That Doesn’t Make You Wrong
Especially the resource piece I find valuable even now, years later:
While renewable energy sources do run out — often as a result of insufficient property rights — non-renewable resources don’t. The conclusion from a century-plus of raw materials’ extraction can thus be neatly summarized as: burn all you want — we’ll find more.
So imagine my surprise, then, and joy when I saw today that the Mises Institute of Portugal had translated this old gem of mine into Portuguese earlier this month. I can read a little Portuguese—especially when I can triangulate meaning by knowing what the content is about—but not enough to remark on the quality (any Portuguese/Brazilian Stackers are welcome to let me know about the quality of the writing!). Lovely to see:
A avaliação de Simon há quase quarenta anos continua a ser verdadeira hoje em dia: as matérias-primas tornaram-se mais abundantes, não mais escassas – ao contrário do que os teóricos do esgotamento querem fazer crer.
Anyway, just wanted to share that story. And that afternoon session definitively made me want to engage in this weird, online-y career or writing and editing.
The soundtrack to all of this was Veronica Maggio's "Tillfälligheter," run on repeat for three hours straight. Ever since I've always associated that song with extreme productivity and a state of 100% blissful flow: