One of my favorite exchanges from the television show Monk:
Monk: "There's an old saying: don't change ANYTHING EVER."
Natalie (Monk's assistant): "THAT'S an old saying?"
Monk: "I've been saying it for years."
Despite the inherent appeal of Monk's advice, and despite the possibility of disconcerting some of my most loyal readers, I'm revamping the j-curve a bit. Taking advantage of my impending research job in Ghana, I've decided to focus more specifically and formally on economics and on the microfinance research that I will be conducting. Although I will still be writing, in general, for a lay audience ("lay" when it comes to econ, of course--y'all are brilliant and technically skilled in your various fields), my economics- and research-related posts will become more numerous, and may become a bit more technical and/or narrowly focused.
Having said that, this blog will still be as effective a means as ever for keeping up with my personal life. I will still post pictures and tell stories in which I get groped by a 15-year-old in public or get into yelling matches with rickshaw drivers over the equivalent of 11 cents (or whatever the Ghanaian equivalent of those stories are). And as always, read what you want and ignore what you want; I will still love and respect you even if you don't read a word of what I write. To facilitate selective reading, I will start using the "labels" function, which you will see at the end of this post (a shout-out to Rebel's blog for giving me the idea and letting me see how it works). My currently plan is to just label each post as either "personal" or "economics", so that if you use the search function at the top of the page, you can type in "personal" to weed out the posts where I discuss, say, the problems I'm having with defining a random control group. Which is not to say that my economics-related posts won't be interesting and accessible, it's just to say that I don't expect you to care just because I do.
This is a bit of an experiment, so we'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm done with grading (yay!) and I am going to spend the evening catching up on other peoples' blogs and just generally goofing off.
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3 comments:
But wouldn't separating the personal from the economical be impossible? Like separating the self from the social?
n- this thought has occurred to me, and you're right: any label that i put on a post will be necessarily imperfect and incomplete. obviously i can't separate myself from my work, and i can't even really separate myself from even general economic concepts insofar as i understand and interpret them in the context of my own life and self. and of course that which transpires in my personal life has, to varying degrees, economic implications.
but these interconnections are largely implicit, and to the extent that they remain implicit in my posts, i'll just ignore them for labeling purposes.
of course, now i'm tempted to start analyzing the mundanities (is that a word?) of my everday life in explicit economic terms, and/or to examine more closely my personal relationship to economic theory. i guess i'll just slap both labels on those posts.
My joke, of course, had to do with a Marxist understanding of the relationship between individual and economic infrastructure....
But that's ok -- you turned my joke into something else. And that's because it was a bad joke. And what you turned it into was a commentary on the inherent limits of any classificatory scheme...
Have you ever read "Think / Classify" by Georges Perec? It deals with precisely this issue, and especially the ways any system of classification is doomed by its own limits, by the way the world's complexity resists the neat divisions upon with classification, as a mode of thinking about the word, rest. It'd be good reading for your flight.
(One of my favorite things about the essay -- and it gives a sense of the approach the essay takes -- is that it is divided into 26 sections, each of which is "enumerated" with an alphabetic letter. But instead of putting A first, as would be customary in an alphabetical system, he orders the letters according to the order of their first appearance in the French translation of a book by Italo Calvino. Which, it turns out, is no less satisfactory than the arbitrary order of letters in our conventional system.)
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