To editors: If your publication would like me to write a version of one of these posts, just let me know. It makes more sense for you to approach me than vice versa. I have good credentials. My academic pedigree can hardly be bettered: Uni High Urbana, Yale econ BA/MA, MIT Econ PhD in the same class as Mankiw, Whinston, and Woodford. Perfect LSAT score, admitted to Yale and Harvard Law but didn’t go; 97th percentile on the math GRE; Erdos 5. I taught at the b-schools at UCLA and Indiana, and spent sabbatical years at Chicago bus, Yale law, Oxford Nuffield College econ, Tokyo econ, and Harvard econ, and law. My book on game theory has been translated into lots of languages, and my AER paper on exclusive-dealing monopoly law has been influential. I’ve co-authored with Richard Posner, Jack Hirshleifer, Mark Ramseyer, and Ian Ayres. See rasmusen.org. You should also know that I am a serious Christian, I’ve been cancelled twice (in 2003 and 2019), and I’m much hated by the right people.
Less impressively, I am a retired economics professor with a pretty good second-rate academic reputation. I find Substack much more satisfying than writing for academic journals and I’m trying to publish here regularly. I also teach 7th grade math; I help professors being persecuted by their universities; I’m a Director of the MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA); I chair the Indiana State Conference AAUP’s Committee A, on academic freedom; I write amicus briefs.
I think I should make this a weekly Substack. I occasionally do that for a month or two, but I’ve had at least one quarter where I didn’t publish anything new at all. If that happens again, the solution is simple: read my old stuff. Maybe it’s even better.
I just decided to raise my subscription rate from $30.00 to $210.00. This should strike terror into your heart. You can still get a free subscription, but what if I end the free subscriptions, and you failed to subscribe at $30 and then at $210 and now it’s $1470 and you feel like a dummy?
That is known in economics as “regret”, and it’s unfair of me to use it, maybe. But I intend to keep the free subscription option. I am pretty rich, having been a business school professor from 1984 to 2021 and having done a lot of saving up till near the end. And I would like lots of people to read me, perhaps from pridefulness but probably because I want to edify—to entertain and to inform. So why have a paid option? —Well, I used to teach my classmate Greg’s blog article, “My Personal Incentives,” to which I’ll refer you because I really ought to be either sending Christmas cards, fussing with finances, writing “How To Make Your Own MFSA”, playing with the baby, or writing an amicus brief for Texas v. TechLords.
At some point, I will organize this into categories, since I am interested in widely varying things: 7th grade math, economic policy, game theory, religion, and thinking.
I will freely edit my articles even after they’re published, without noting what I’ve changed. Whenever I see something I’ve written, I see ways to improve it, so I’ll do it. If I wrote something particularly wrong and embarassing that I think someone else might care about, I might make a note of that, but I don’t think I’m important enough for anyone to care that “Eric Rasmusen said X, but then he admitted he was wrong and deleted it!”. If you think I’m trying to hide something shameful and need to confess, let me know and I’ll say something in the comments section of that article.
