Pandemic Passage: My Past 12 Months in Blogging — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

*Image source: “Finnish Icebreaker Sets New Record For Earliest Transit Through Northwest Passage”*

Today is the 9th anniversary of this blog, "Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal." My first post, "What is a Supply-Side Liberal?" appeared on May 28, 2012. I have written an anniversary post every year since then:

Every year, events in the world and events in my own blog inspire blog posts. On this 9th blogiversary, I want to take you on a tour of how events, both personal and national, affected my blogging in the past year.

Let me begin by saying what hasn’t changed this past year on my blog. With few exceptions, every week I do three full-scale blog posts, and have a link-of-the-day to something someone else has written on the other four days of the week. On Tuesdays, I blog about diet and health; here is my bibliographic post laying those posts out: “Miles Kimball on Diet and Health: A Reader's Guide.” Every other Sunday, I blog my way through a classic. Having finished blogging through John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Locke’s Second Treatise a while back (see “John Stuart Mill’s Defense of Freedom” and “The Social Contract According to John Locke”), I am now blogging my way through The Federalist Papers. All the links to the posts I have done so far on The Federalist Papers are in the most recent of those posts: “The Federalist Papers #31: Alexander Hamilton's Attempt at a Formal Argument for a Robust Federal Power of Taxation.” On Thursdays, I write about a wide variety of topics, including many core economic issues, such as negative interest rate policy (see for example “How the Nature of the Transmission Mechanism from Rate Cuts Guarantees that Negative Rates have Unlimited Firepower” and my bibliographic post on negative interest rate policy, “How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide”), “The Optimal Rate of Inflation,” fiscal policy (see for example “Critiquing the Wall Street Journal Editorial Pages on Fiscal Policy”) and financial stability policy (see for example “Higher Capital Requirement May Be Privately Costly to Banks, But Their Financial Stability Benefits Come at a Near Zero Cost to Society”).

What has shifted this year? First, the past year’s news has been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrations and debates about racism, antiracism and wokeness, and the 2020 US Presidential election and related subsequent events. Each of those news threads inspired some of my blog posts this past year.

Though I wrote many of my posts on the pandemic a little over a year ago, in the past 12 months, I had …

On the Pandemic:

The heightened discussion of racism, antiracism and wokeness in the past year made me think not only about those subjects, but about feminist issues as well …

On Racism, Anti-Racism, Feminism and Wokeness:

On my blog I stayed out of politics more than usual in the last little while, simply because I was imposing a screen of what I could write about in a way that would be reasonably nonpartisan. But I did have these 4 posts …

On the 2020 US Presidential election and related subsequent events:

Among big personal events in my life were the death of my son-in-law’s mother from COVID-19 and the deaths of my sister and sister-in-law from other causes. I didn’t write about my son-in-law’s mother’s death because that wasn’t my story to tell, but I did write about my sister and my sister-in-law:

On Deaths in My Family:

The other big thing in my personal life this past year is that I took advantage of the pandemic lockdown to get a lot more training as a life coach. Remotely, I had 112 hours worth of training as an Organization and Relationship System’s coach and a lot of training as a Positive Intelligence coach—modes of coaching that dovetail nicely with being a Certified Professional Co-Active coach. I did all of this together with my wife Gail. This interest in coaching has been reflected in many blog posts. See all the links in “The Golden Mean as Concavity of Objective Functions.”

I am using my training as a Positive Intelligence coach to offer free Positive Intelligence group coaching for “economists and family.” See

Already, I have taken many dozen “economists and family” through this program in Positive Intelligence Circles I have been a co-leader for. This has been a great experience for me as well as for the participants in this program.

Posts inspired by coaching have taken many of the Sunday slots not taken by The Federalist papers. In the past I have thought of those slots as primarily for religion posts, and there have been some of those this past 12 months …

On Religion:

Another theme with roots in my more distant blogging past has become more salient in the past year: the “religious” or “theological” implications of science for a convinced nonsupernaturalist like me. In reverse chronological order, going back even before the last 12 months, here is the type of post I mean …

On the “Theological” Implications of Science:

My research continued this past year, as usual; I had mostly been working with coauthors on Zoom even before the pandemic. Several papers I coauthored came to some level of completion. I wrote about them in these posts …

On Papers Miles has Coauthored:

I also had occasion to think about the research process and about math, both specifically and generally …

On the Research Process and Math:

One of my whimsical endeavors this past year was to write some limericks about economics, and to make Tiktoks of some of them. You can see all the links to the ones so far in “Tiktok of Econolimerick #2.”

Finally, some things in my life didn’t generate blog posts. I was delighted by a granddaughter born this past year, now 10 months old. She was playing happily here in my study while I was writing this post—a wonderful thing that Covid-19 vaccination has made safe. Our grandson is two-and-a-half and is now talking up a storm. Gail and I celebrated our 36th wedding anniversary this past year. Our children and their partners are doing well. Gail and I settled in to some serious binge watching of TV series during the pandemic. Gail watched my all-time favorite series “Babylon 5” with me. (It was at least the 3d time for me.) Other notable series we finished were “Game of Thrones,” “The Americans,” “Elementary,” “The Man in the High Castle,” “The Crown,” and “Victoria.” Currently, we are watching “Homeland” and “House.” I recommend them all.