1. A concise guide to housing finance policy issues. Would include chapters on past housing finance debacles, the role of special interests, why taxpayers end up bearing risk, comparisons with other countries, …
2. Secession Scenarios. This would describe scenarios in which a number of American communities of 10 million or fewer become self-governing. It will discuss technological enablers, political and economic preconditions, and ramifications.
3. Quackroeconomics. Sort of an anti-textbook. There are many criticisms of macroeconomics. This book will focus on the ones that matter.
4. ______?
The anti-textbook one.
Any of them would be a good read, I’d guess. In order 2, 3, 1.
Option for 4: a collection of your best columns that I could then buy as gifts for friends.
Agreed
The anti-textbook
Either (1) or (3). I don’t think (2) would sell well.
#2.
Include chapters on “Seasteading”, special economic zones elsewhere in the world (Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras’ RED zone), and the private sector’s rapid entry into space as enablers.
I sincerely hope to be able to try new polities than the current set of choices before I get too old. I haven’t found one I like yet.
I agree with these inclusions for #2 as well!
I’d like to see the anti-textbook first.
2, 3, 1
Quackroeconomics.
What is your objective? To be read (and to sell books)? To influence policy? To influence the blogosphere? To expand your reader base or to feed your current readers?
I think (1) would do the greatest good. There is a dire need for someone knowledgeable and unbiased to speak out. It may even influence policy (sadly, I doubt it, despite your expertise and lucid writing). It could sell many copies (if you give it a financial-crisis-related title).
(2) would do well with the libertarian crowd but I fear will be largely ignored.
(3) would do well with econ bloggers and Austrian economists perhaps, but for all the faults of macroeconomics, I do not think is crucial for today’s policy debates.
Yes. #1 would do the most good. Start there.
I have to agree. I think (1) is the stand out here as far as the greatest good and the best seller.
I can see #3 having potentially the widest audience, if you can pull it off the right way.
#1 would probably be very good, but I don’t think I’d buy it. If your course on MR University was particularly popular, maybe this book would be a more successful proposition than I think it would be.
#2 would be a libertarian talking to libertarians only. The way to get around that might to be coming at it from a different angle, using the existing federalist structure to talk about competitive government.
#1 follows your expertise and is relevant to current policy issues.
#1
#3 because it’s nice reading someone who actually thinks about macroecon instead of just thinking how to get the next paper published.
#1 for similar reasons, and because you are such an expert. However, at this point I tend to find housing policy depressing.
I’d read #2. I like scifi.
Absolutely the first one. Turn your MU class into a book. But don’t make it polemical. which would turn off many potential readers.
None of the above, at least in book format. It is continually maddening to me how bloggers simply lapse into that antiquated book format, despite its glaring deficiencies. You could write about all of these topics as a series of blog posts and make them available online.
If you wanted to get paid for your time, as most who publish paid books do, you could easily make those particular blog posts subscription-only: the cost of employing a programmer or admin to enable or add that paid feature to your blog would almost certainly be less than Amazon’s cut from ebook sales. You can even use Amazon’s APIs to have your subscribers login and pay through their Amazon account if you wanted to, so that the only difference would be that they’d access your text directly from your blog as opposed to from Amazon’s servers.
You, of all people, should be on the cutting edge of this trend, rather than simply following the herd onto Amazon’s self-publishing platform.
Blue-sky though it might be, I think #2 would be an interesting read. This is especially so because I think the political odds are very much stacked against it. On the one hand, the Democratic party is still very much committed to centralized government at the US national level. On the other hand, the Republican party derives significant political advantages from its strength in less populated states and in less populated areas of more populous states (given the structural imbalance between smaller and larger states in the US Senate, and between urban and rural areas within states), and the Republican base benefits from redistribution from urban areas to rural areas in the form of military spending, etc.
So it would be interesting to think upon what sorts of political and other changes would be required in order for any sort of big city secession movement to be able to be successful, and how that dynamic might actually play out.
I’d like to see #1, particulaly if it’s on issues other than what everyone else has been writing about ad nauseam.
+1 for #3 OR #4 PSST.
Looking forward to reading!
All very good options. I vote #2 if you’re feeling creative – I’m particularly interested in the technological enablers. But of course it would be valuable to have you setting the record straight about many of our falsifiable and far too widely believed macroeconomic notions with #3
The Macro anti-text book; then the secession book.
I would most enjoy reading 2 and would most benefit from reading 1. I am going to say print 1 first, the world needs expertise more than science fiction thought experiments, and the return to being a housing policy expert is higher than the return to being a little-read science fiction author.
Anti-textbook.
There are already far too many books claiming to tell us what we know with certainty, and not nearly enough books pointing out the limits of our knowledge.
#4
The economic factors that brought about major transformations in the citizenry:
1900-1920
1930-1950
1960-2008
Plus the political changes resulting from the major transformations.
Something along the lines of the Charles Murray-type observations, but keyed to the economic factors and feed-through into the political. Something a bit more wide-ranging (and factors based) than Eberstadt’s “A nation of Takers.”
Someone very wise should do something really good related to #2. Why did a cluster of institutions for small economic entities (notably trading cities and little republics) prosper so much for so long but only in a few areas, and then vanish so completely? It’s one of those puzzles like “why the Industrial Revolution? why there at that time?” But we seem to have better answers about the Industrial Revolution puzzle, and the small economic entities puzzle seems to have more significance for the modern world. Any back of the envelope calculation of the tax revenue potentially available from a prosperous charter city ought to be enough to make some powerful people rationally interested in a pretty solid answer to this question. It’s not obvious that you’ll be able to just sit down and crank out a solid answer, though.
Doing #3 would probably be a lot more straightforward, and it sounds useful too. Given how much macroeconomics is intertwined with politics and status affiliation, though, it might be very widely unread.
Really, since you’ve never sounded very happy about the “widely unread” property of your other book, maybe the thing to do is think more carefully about what wider markets exist. Just because I like the ideas of #2 and #3 doesn’t necessarily mean that more than 700 people would ever be tempted to read either one.
Professor Kling- do you mean an e-book single like The Three Languages? #1 might work wonderfully in that format. #3 might have to be a series of them. I would be interested in both topics.
An anti-textbook on housing finance issues in seceded communities.
” Quackroeconomics”, please.
At the risk of sounding greedy, is it too much to imagine that a ‘ Quackroeconomics’ textbook can comfortably include discussions of topics 1 & 2, amongst many others?
I like #1.
You often have a unique take on housing finance issues (“That’s not the right question” types of responses, for instance), and I think an approachable ebook could be a way for you to express some of those counter-intuitive views that could reach policymakers and wonks alike.
Only 3 has a chance of selling meaningfully. 1 – there have been several done already. 2 is too far out there. 3 sounds like it could grab some attention.
#2 then #3.
The latter may be more important.
But hopefully I am wrong about that… The world could used some fresh countries…
Definitely #3. Since I’ve started dabbling in education policy, the things I’ve heard from you regarding PSST and comparative advantage vs aggregate-centric macro resonate at an uncontrollable volume. Maybe “which should I write a book about?” isn’t the question I’m answering, but #3 is the line of inquiry I’m most interested in hearing you expand upon, and the one I think that would prove most useful universally.
So I”ve finally read Selgin’s theory of free banking and I think it is correct.
However I need a corresponding book on loanable funds, credit and psst.
So in a biological cell, the microtubules grow and shrink, suffer from catastrophe. There is cool videos of it on the web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microtubule skip down to the section on dynamic instability.
I wanted to believe money/currency is like the gtp or whathave you, and once if it runs out their is a catastrophe, but let say free banking is implemented and I no monetary short fall or mismatch is no longer a problem, then it is credit or a creditor failing that causes a chain of linked or psst creditors to fail.
It would also be interesting to put PSST, and Rowes Dutch Capital Theory, and Assymetric Information, theory of the firm together.
This wouldn’t be fun to write, but it would be useful to me.
#2 or #4: The Rise of the Vickies, or the Snow Crash/Diamond Age-ification of America (may overlap with #2).
Sorry for the blast from the past. I was reading your feed in chronological order. I’ll still buy and read quackronomics.