In today’s issue:
On a type of power greater than money
How to keep your eye on the prize (Bourdieu)
How Cowen and Tabarrok built the most successful independent media brand run by working academics
Work on your writing in a community of peers every morning this week
A Power Greater Than Money
Back in September, I learned about an Australian man who turned down $50M from a real estate developer. The developer was planning to convert the area into a suburb. Here is the area, before and after the development:
The story made one news cycle, but it’s stuck with me, for it bears witness to a rare and distinct type of power—a type of power that is not abstractly but evidently greater than money. And notice this is not NIMBYism, for he did not prevent anyone from building new houses.
This man is now the visible king of this suburb. He owns something mysterious that money cannot buy, he has publicly proven that his power level is greater than $50M, whereas the power of his neighbors does not exceed the price of their new deracinated homes.
The suburban arriviste wants to play-act as a king of his own little fiefdom, in an artificially conquered and homogenized environment, but he never could have predicted that, upon moving into his new pseudo-castle, he would find himself rather the subject of a superior man.
The arriviste will, of course, scoff and mock his king, calling him a pre-modern brute and worse, but none of the castigations will ever dispel the arriviste’s inner awareness that he lives in the vicinity of a rarer and nobler type of man. He’ll insist otherwise until the end of his life, and yet the proof will stare back at him on every walk of the dog, and every morning coffee at the window.
I hope one day I have an opportunity to reject an extraordinary sum of money for something that I value beyond measure.
“Grace is to the body what clear thinking is to the mind.” —La Rochefoucauld
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize
If you pay much attention to parochial interpersonal spats among the famous or wealthy people, you’re a sucker.
People think they are watching crucial battles between institutions and classes, but they’re not. They’re watching petty mimetic status rivalries where the participants project a grand battle between ideals and classes, because that is a winning strategy for them, personally.
The single best teacher on this larger point remains Bourdieu, whose unique blend of quantitative sociology and continental philosophy has still not been fully appreciated. He showed better than anyone how every class tries to express its own parochial interest as a general social problem. The wealthy and high-status are usually the most successful, for obvious reasons.
Today thanks to real-time info-sharing platforms like Twitter, their ability to magnify their pettiest personal concerns into grand drama with supposedly public and political significance is breathtaking.
Don’t fall for it.
If you’re interested in Bourdieu, I recommend starting with the Pascalian Meditations (2000).
How Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok Built Marginal Revolution
Marginal Revolution is probably the most successful and impressive independent media project run by working academics. Here are a few interesting notes I took from their recent interview on David Perell’s podcast How I Write.
Marginal Revolution began in August 2003, pre-dating social media. Tyler has published at least one new post every single day. By my count, that means Tyler has a daily posting streak of 7,428 days.
The blog's success far exceeded all expectations. When they first started, they thought getting "famous" would mean gaining 5,000 readers. They got to 10,000 in the first few months.
MR's approach to content is to be present across various platforms, including Twitter and YouTube, to reach audiences who consume information in different ways.
The blog is seen as "dim sum for the mind," i.e. short, diverse pieces.
MR's subtitle, "Small steps toward a much better world," encapsulates the belief in incremental progress and compounding returns from small actions.
Marginal Revolution University (MRU) is a leading free economics education site on YouTube, aiming to be in 25% of American high schools by 2025.
Analytics from MRU and the blog reveal strong interest from India, with the potential for the greatest impact abroad.
The blog's comment section is especially pessimistic (not clear why).
They say inbound email quality is extremely high, with 80% of emails being insightful and contributing to the authors' learning and networking.
They attribute the great success of MR to consistent daily posting, the integration of various projects (blog, textbook, podcast, YouTube channel), and their enjoyable commitment to the process.
They emphasize the importance of brevity, getting to the point, and crafting memorable, pithy sayings.
They believe the internet's role in shaping discourse and the written word is still underrated.
Work on Your Writing This Week
Paid subscribers are welcome to join our co-writing sessions any morning this week from 9-11am Central in the community.
These member-run meetings are a simple, fun, easy way to make progress on your ideas and keep that writing habit up—in a small community of independent scholars. These sessions are so useful that members volunteer to run them.
Joel says feel free to join up to 15 minutes early if you’d like to meet a few people and have some extra chat. Get an invite to the community and free access to events by becoming a member.