Everything is Changing
Today is the 10th 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:
I don’t say lightly that I feel more than ever in my adult life that the world is changing. The pandemic, besides its direct stresses, has made us all look at work differently. Large-scale war has returned to Europe. Political polarization and associated bad behavior is worse than it has been since the 1960s.
More parochially, the audience for blogs seems to be changing. I feel I am serving a different readership than I was a few years ago, as many are drawn off toward following the news of the other changes I mentioned above. I can’t predict where things will go in the future.
In my personal life, everything seems different in 2022. New Year’s day found me and my family temporary refugees from a wildfire that destroyed about 10% of the houses in my town of Superior, Colorado and the neighboring city of Louisville, Colorado. (See “New Year's Gratitude on the Occasion of the Marshall Fire.”) Soon after that I began a semester in which I put a concerted effort into creating a new course and improving an existing course. (See “Ethics, Happiness and Choice—Miles's Economics 4060,” “Intermediate Macroeconomics—Miles's Economics 3080.”) It felt more like I was changing than simply what I was teaching. On May 15, our youngest, Jordan, married Caroline. That, too, has far-reaching ramifications us as a family as well as for them as a couple. (Our daughter Diana married Erik in 2017. Jordan’s marriage to Caroline means both of our children are now married.)
To handle everything going on (my research continued at full speed), for the first time in a long time I missed doing some blog posts in my usual 3-times-a-week schedule (not counting link posts). But as I look back over the year’s blog posts using the “Archive” button up above I am amazed at how well I did manage to keep up the pace on my blog.
For the past decade, blogging has been a major part of my life. It gives meaning to every week as I put down in words what I have been learning and thinking and try to influence in some small way the path our civilization is taking.
A decade from now, I plan to retire. I think I can do a lot in that time, personally, academically and on this blog. And I have big plans for my retirement after that, beginning with writing an autobiography.
I look forward to seeing where the world will go in the next ten years. I am an optimist. Event sometimes thrust us into the underworld, but we learn things there and with a little luck and a lot of fortitude, we can come back stronger and more true to our deepest values. May we all strive toward a better world ten years from now than the one we see around us now. I’ll meet you there.