why i'm here, part 2, and how you, dear reader, can help

One of my motivations for writing a blog was to practice. To practice writing, to practice thinking analytically, to practice everything that goes into thinking about economics, society, law. The idea that these are things that require practice was planted in my mind by a book I read a few years ago, The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle. Coyle makes the argument that what we think of as "talent" is actually the result of "deep practice". The first premise is that talent is not innate, but the product of many, many hours of practice. (An example that sticks in my mind, I believe from his book thought I don't have it in front of me, is that while we think of Tiger Woods as a golfing prodigy, he learned the game at such a young age - two - that by the time he became the youngest winner of a major, he had already been playing seriously for twenty years. These numbers are from wikipedia.)

The next point Coyle makes, as set forth in the first chapter, which you can read here, is that acheiving this kind of success requires "deep practice." Deep practice, he writes, "is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted way -- operating at the edge of your ability, where you make mistakes -- makes you smarter. . . . Experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them . . . end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it." (p. 18). (The book, and website, go on to theorize that deep practice actually changes the structure of the brain, theories which are important and fascinating but I won't go into here.)

In that sense, I can say that this blog is a kind of "deep practice." If I have any glimmer of hope of one day writing about, say, economics and society, it won't be sufficient to simply read and think about economics and society. Listening to Planet Money and reading The New Yorker may give me some benefit, but it is not deep enough practice. Only by forcing myself to articulate my thoughts and make sure they sound coherent (and remotely interesting) will I be engaged in anything resembling the type of deep practice that Coyle says is necessary to achieve success.

To that end, each of these blog posts requires finding the delicate balance between achieving the most practiced, revised, reworked, close-to-perfect post I can create, and achieving, well, a Blog, composed of published posts. For each post I am going to try to push myself to "the edge of my ability", where I might make mistakes and have to think through difficult arguments or transitions or analyses. But eventually I'm going to hit that "Publish" button, and after that time, Dear Reader, I am going to need you to give me feedback on how I might finetune my writing and thinking the next time around.

And on that note, I'm hitting "Publish"....