How to Arrange an Interview

-First of all, operate under the assumption that the person you are trying to arrange a meeting with is busy, much busier than you. Keep this in the forefront of your mind throughout this process.

Subject Lines

-As part of this course, each of you will be required to interview two “experts” in your field of inquiry. If you do not have any contacts in this field, you may have to send a “cold email.” Even if you do know some experts in your field, I recommend reaching out to a stranger for at least one of the interviews. To do this successfully, your subject line has to compel the recipient to open and read your email. Remember, this individual is much busier than you; he or she doesn’t actually read every email he or she receives. To this end, your subject line must capture their attention and also convey the content of your email. Vague subject lines such as “Interview” will likely not pass muster. 

-To capture the recipient’s attention, some professional tipsters recommend using all caps for your subject line. In my opinion, this is a little obnoxious, and far too many people do it, which a) indicates that many people don’t understand the importance of their emails, and b) prevents emails that are actually important to be distinguishable. Instead, I suggest using the recipient’s name. “Mr. Goes,...” People’s eyes are drawn to their own names, and I doubt anyone else in the recipient’s inbox will have adopted a similar strategy.

-As for content, like I said above, vagueness turns people off. Many people mistakenly believe that the subject line should be vague, or general, or summary. Following this approach makes your email indistinguishable. For cold emails, put your request right into the subject line. Be as specific as possible. “Mr. Goes, I would like to interview you about the economic effects of climate change.” 

Body Content

-Remember that the recipient is very busy. Therefore, your email should be very short. Get right to the point. Don’t waste time with apologies for bothering them. At the same time, don’t lose sight of the fact that the recipient will not likely say yes to a meeting with you if they have no idea who you are or what you’re about. Many of you made big assumptions in setting up your summer interviews, which I suspect would not be the case for your communications with your “experts.” Still, it’s worth saying: “Ben, Just wondering when would be a good time to interview you? Thanks.” would be inadequate. 

-Do introduce yourself. Briefly. “My name is Benjamin Goes, and I’m working on a project studying climate change as an economic opportunity.” If you have some network connection to this person, mention it here. Don’t try to include a short biography of you or your work. 

-Do explain why you’ve chosen them to contact. “I’ve read a number of books and articles in this area, and a number of them included references to your work.” You should try to establish some ethos in this step; show them that this isn’t random, that you are actually doing work in their area. Don’t offer flattery. Don’t overstate your own credentials.

-Do tell them why you’re contacting them. “I would like to meet with [or call] you to ask some questions I have about your findings and hopefully gain some insights that would be helpful in my own project.” This request is really what this email is all about. I personally would embolden it. Don’t ask them to look at your project and offer feedback. Don’t ask them to help you with your project. 

-Do offer a concrete plan to meet. See below.

Scheduling

-Many of you did not offer a concrete plan for meeting, leaving much of it up to the coordinators. I know that you probably thought that you were being helpful, making things easier for us, by being “wide open” or “flexible.” You were the opposite. Remember, the recipient is very busy. If it feels like it would take too much effort to set up this meeting, the recipient won’t bother trying. Again, you may think that it’s more convenient for the recipient if he or she gets to decide when and where to meet. But the truth is, making decisions is inconvenient. To make this easy for the recipient, you ultimately want to present them with a situation where they just have to agree or disagree. The more specific you are, the easier it becomes for the recipient to look at his calendar and see whether the offered times “work” or not. 

-So, offer a plan. “The library.” “Coffee.” “Lunch.” “Phone call in the evening.” Offer a location, if you can. “The UAlbany library.” “The Starbucks on the corner of 155 and Route 20.” And offer some dates. One date is probably too narrow; it runs the risk of an outright rejection of the meeting. A string of dates is probably too broad; it starts to feel like work for the recipient to try to see how they all might fit into his or her schedule. 3 or 4 dates is probably best. Try to scatter the times a bit: two on different Saturday mornings, one on a Tuesday evening, for example. 

-This will make some of you nervous, because "what if none of the times work for the recipient?" Well, there is a possibility that you will just be turned down. However, there is also a possibility that the recipient will be appreciative of the fact that you made things easy for him or her and make a counteroffer. 

Other Things

-The initial email should be short. 5 or 6 sentences, max. To test this, email your message to yourself, first, then look at it on your phone. Is there a lot of scrolling involved? Could the recipient read through and understand your message in 30 seconds?

-Match the Recipient: Some of you started to treat your emails like text messages. Stay appropriately formal. There is a point where you no longer have to address the recipient (Mr. Goes, …) at the beginning of an email or sign off (Thanks, Ben) at the end; the second email you send is not that point. As long as the recipient is addressing you, address them back. Same goes for tempo. Once you send an important email, monitor your inbox. If the recipient responds within the hour, you should also respond within an hour of receiving the response. If the recipient takes a few days, you can probably take a few days too. This is an indication of how the recipient operates, and you want to show that you can fit into that operation comfortably.

-Always send a “thank you” note. Like this initial email, it should be brief, and it doesn’t have to mention anything of substance that was discussed, but it does need to get sent. These notes may be rarely read, but people definitely notice when they don’t get one. 

-If you want the recipient to learn about your project, which I know you do, leave the choice up to him or her by linking to your website. Do this at the bottom of the email, after your sign-off (but don’t use “P.S.”). I recommend linking to your About page, not your Home page. 

-Proofread. And then have someone else proofread. Typos tell the recipient that you don’t care. Don’t send any emails in the chain from your phone, if you can avoid it.

Sample Email

Subject: Dr. Anderson, I would like to interview you about the economic effects of climate change.

Dear Dr. Anderson,

My name is Benjamin Goes, and I am working on a project studying climate change as an economic opportunity. I have read a number of books and articles in this area, most recently Block’s Water Capitalism, and many of these sources included references to your work. I would like to meet with you to ask some questions I have about your findings and hopefully gain some insights that would be helpful in my own project.

Are you available for coffee at the Starbucks on the corner of State and Broadway this upcoming Saturday (9/2) morning? Or perhaps next Saturday (9/9) morning, or Tuesday (9/12) evening?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Benjamin Goes

Market Environmentalism

Why Do CEOs Study Philosophy?

*This was the speech that I prepared to deliver on August 28th during our E=mc2 meeting. However, I realized about the minute I started talking that it was probably a waste of time and greatly amended it.*

________________________________________________________________

Good afternoon, Everyone. Those of you who have previously attended one of my lectures know that I like to start them with a story. Sometimes it’s a funny story; this one is not.

For those of you who don’t know, the Supreme Court of the United STates is not a very good court. I apologize for shattering any misconceptions you might have had, but, just like the President sucks, and Congress sucks, the Court sucks. It’s very political, and political decisions tend to be bad decisions. So, a while back, we had a very right-wing court come out with a decision wherein it stated that law enforcement did not need a warrant to be on your property. The police only need a warrant if they would be able to see into your home. The theory, of course, was that warrants were for violations of privacy, not private property, which is wrong, but this right-wing court wanted to support law enforcement, so...that’s the decision that we got.

Now, a couple years later, officers in Kingston nabbed a petty drug dealer. He offered information in exchange for leniency. He told the cops about this old lady growing marijuana on her farm up in the mountains. The cops go take a look and, sure enough, they find the marijuana. They arrest the woman. Her defense was that the police didn’t have a warrant when they searched her property. The police relied on the recent Supreme Court decision, and the woman was convicted. The case got appealed up to the Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, and, really, one of the finest courts in the country. The police, again, relied on the Supreme Court decision that said that they didn’t need a warrant of they weren’t gonna get close enough to the woman’s house to look through her windows. And, in some of the best shade ever thrown at the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals essentially said that the words of the Supreme Court relied upon by the prosecution had no effect here. In this civilized state, the government needed a warrant to trespass upon any portion of an individual’s private property. Fantastic decision.

Now, there was some apprehension from some of the research coordinators about my speech, because I submitted the name of the speech first. And, like some of you, they were probably wondering what the hell this question has to do with the EMC program. Well, I didn’t ask the question. I just get to answer it, and the answer, I think, is very relevant to this program.

If you think about it, the job of a CEO is to answer questions. What to do. How to do it. Who should do it. These questions come thick and fast, all day, every day. The CEO gets a lot of practice answering these kinds of questions. But, as any athlete can tell you, the real gains come when you switch up your routine. So, for the CEO to get better at answering questions, he has to grapple with different, more challenging questions. And that’s where philosophy comes in, because philosophy, too, is all about questions. Very very big questions. What is justice? What is good? What is man? Should you pull the lever to redirect the trolley? These are all very difficult, very abstract questions, questions that some of the greatest thinkers in history have been struggling with for thousands of years, questions that we still don’t have definitive answers to. 

Imagine, for a moment, that every morning you spent an hour trying to answer a question like “What is justice?” Imagine how much easier all of the other questions you face throughout the day would seem by comparison. What challenge does a routine business question pose when your mind regularly faces down such heavyweights as “What is the nature of man?” So studying philosophy makes CEOs better at answering the questions that they’re paid to answer. That’s one reason why CEOs study philosophy.

But there’s another reason. You see, there’s a certain satisfaction that comes from trying to answer these big questions. Just like after a hard workout, when you’re dripping with sweat and breathing like a bellows, and a second ago you though that you weren’t gonna make it another second, there’s a certain quiet satisfaction that you get. You start to smile a little bit. You just did something amazing. Something that not everyone else can do. Something that you weren’t even sure that you could do. Asking, and attempting to answer, these philosophical questions is the same. It’s a difficult answer. People have been trying to do what you’re doing for millenia. Almost all, if not all, of them have failed. The attempt exhausts you. Your brain just isn’t used to working that hard, isn’t used to maintaining chains of reasoning that long or that complex. But you’re doing something that other people aren’t doing. And it’s satisfying. You start to enjoy it. You start to like the challenge. You start coming up with your own questions, you criticize other people's answers, you finally come up with coherent answers of your own. And it’s awesome.

John Stuart Mill, a philosopher, wrote a bit about what he called the higher and lower pleasures. He said that the lower pleasures, like video games, are good because they make the masses happy. But the higher pleasures, like philosophy, although they don’t make the philosophers as happy as the video games make the common men, are better, because philosophy provides a different kind of pleasure. Yes, it’s intensely frustrating trying to figure out “What is the good?” But it’s also exciting. Interesting. Stimulating. Mill said: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates satisfied than a fool satisfied.” Once you start asking these questions, once you start trying to answer them for yourself, rather than just accept someone else’s answer, it changes you. You become dissatisfied with anything less; you want more of this experience. So this satisfaction one gets from struggling with big questions, this is the other reason CEOs study philosophy.

Now, with the possible exception of Alex, I don’t expect any of you will be dealing with the traditional philosophical questions this year. But there will be questions. Exciting, interesting, stimulating questions. Questions that haven’t been asked before, that you’ll have to answer for yourself. And it’ll be trilling. And it will make you think. And it will make you think better. That’s my goal for all of you, for this program. To get you to ask good questions.

What does a good question look like? I know you’ve all been told that there’s no such thing as a dumb question, but some questions are better than others. “When is lunch?” is not on the same level as “What is the purpose of law?” So, a couple of illustrations:

Have any of you heard of Hans-Hermann Hoppe? Well, Professor Hoppe is one of the greatest thinkers alive today. Why do I say that? Because he questions assumptions. His most famous book is called Democracy: The God That Failed, if that gives you any ideas. But I want to talk about a presentation he gave at an American history conference soon after his arrival in the United States. He was giving a paper on the US Constitution. Everyone in the audience was a little skeptical of what this German economist could add to their knowledge of the topic. But Professor Hoppe got up there, and he argued that the US Constitution, and indeed all constitutions, represented a vast increase in government power, and that this was their true purpose. In the name of limiting government, these constitutions invariably appear in periods of history when the elites are regrouping to emerge from what they consider to be almost anarchy. Constitutions purport to restrict the elites’ rule, but they actually grant legitimacy to it. At the end of his presentation, you could hear a pin drop. Everything the audience thought it knew about the Constitution had been challenged. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you know that the Constitution is a check on government power, right? Right? But how many of us actually take the time to justify our assumption? Almost no one, because almost no one else even notices the bias, since almost everyone else shares that bias. Was Hoppe right? I don’t know. But I think it’s astounding that Hoppe was perhaps the first to ask the question “What to the actual effect of a written constitution?” instead of just accepting the answer everyone assumes. 

How many of our other assumptions are wrong? Probably a lot of them. And yet, they’re so universally accepted that we never stop to consider them, we never expend that little bit of extra thought that we need to see the flaws in them. 

The other example that I’ll throw out there, just briefly, is Jonah Goldstein’s project from last year. Last year, Jonah started out with, essentially, the question “How can we make school better?” Fine question. A purposeful question. But the most interesting part of his project, the part that compelled me to share his work with others, was his research and ruminations on the question “What is childhood?” Do you see how much deeper that question is? How much more potentially difficult it is to answer? How much more interesting the answer might be? I’m not saying that the second question is more important than the first; just that it requires a different kind of thinking. Because it’s probably not something you’ve ever bothered to ask before. It exercises your mind.

As time goes on, and you interact with these types of questions, you’ll get better at recognizing them. You’ll be questioning everything, all the time. “I’m studying economics.” “What is economics? Why is it important to study economics? What’s the most important lesson in economics?” “I made a new friend today.” “What is friendship? Have you considered the global consequences of your new relationship with this person?” “I want to start a compost pile.” “Why? Is composting the best thing you can do with food waste? Can we call it waste if we’re using it for something?” It’s annoying for the people around you. It’s exhausting for you. And it’s the best part of being a living human being. This higher please found through inquiry. This drive to understand, to think for yourself. It’s an amazing thing. And I’m excited to be here, with you all, as you develop this ability this year. 

Now let’s see what progress you’ve already made.

J13 - Research Update

After finishing Mises’ Human Action, I took a break from reading and focused on writing for a while, first my Self-Designed Assignment, then my Journals on Economics and Time, all of which took much longer than I wanted. Recently, however, I’ve returned to my reading.

First, I decided to start reading the first half of Menger’s Principles of Economics, primarily because I wanted to borrow some of his terminology for my project. I quickly abandoned this, though, because I had already mostly absorbed his language, and the actual content of the Grundsätze felt repetitive after so many years of reading and writing and studying in the Austrian tradition. 

I then moved on to what I expected to be my seminal source (see my post on How to Research), Rothbard’s famous article “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution.” Now, I suppose that, technically, it is a seminal text, since the field of market environmentalism has developed in its shadow, with almost every later work making some reference to it. I, however, did not find it very useful. I had actually read “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” back in college, so I should have known better, but the article is so hyped by current Austrian scholars that I thought it was worth rereading. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, the article spends very little time on the air pollution part, the part that drew me. There’s definitely information and ideas here that I could use in my project, and I think that there’s an implicit lesson in its prolonged focus on property rights (to be elaborated upon in a later Journal), but, ultimately, this article will be much less significant to my project than I had expected.

Luckily, I gave Rothbard an opportunity to redeem himself by reading his chapter on “Conservation, Ecology, and Growth” in For a New Liberty, a book I last read in high school (I remember writing about the history of classical liberal thought, learned from this book, in my SAT essay). This text gave me some meat, offering at-length descriptions of market solutions to some environmental problems. There was no real new ground here, but it was a nice refresher. One thing I liked was how similar Rothbard’s explanation of prices acting to conserve resources was to my own explanation of the coordinating function of the price system in my Self-Designed Assignment. It’s always good to get confirmation from the big man. I also liked Rothbard’s discussion of the role of technology in solving environmental problems, which I think relates nicely to my project and its focus on change and controlling change. Still, I don’t think my project will rely too strongly on this source.

Moving forward, I’d like to read Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, Scott’s Natural Resources: The Economics of Conservation, Poole’s “Reason and Ecology,” Block’s Water Capitalism, and Reisman’s “Environmentalism in the Light of Menger and Mises.” I might have to go to a college library for some of these. After reading these I plan to take some time to write out everything I’ll already have so that I’ll have a clearer idea of what I really need to focus on for the rest of my project. I hope to have this all done by the end of September (so throw another SDA in there).

How to Research

I am aware that not all of you are doing traditional research projects, so I know that the following guidelines won’t be fully applicable to all of you. However, for those of you who have never done an independent research project before, and who may be somewhat lost, I thought that it might be helpful for me to share my own approach to research: 

1)  Pick a topic.  Preferably something you’re interested in.

2)  Review your current knowledge of the topic.  Write a journal, perhaps, describing everything you already know about the topic. Determine what areas you’re ignorant in and decide whether those gaps in your knowledge should be filled in.

3)  Conduct a literature review from 30,000 feet.  Google your topic. Read the first ten results thoroughly. The goal is to augment your own understanding of the topic and to discover current areas of controversy, not to find concrete facts/information. Record any questions that occur to you during this cursory search.

4)  Find, and read, a seminal source.   It’s been said that all of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. Oftentimes, a subject area will develop or at least progress under the shadow of one or a few significant scholarly works, so that, at least implicitly, all further scholarly contributions must either rely upon them or answer them. Find one of these seminal works for your topic (likely discoverable through your cursory research in step 3), read it, and reflect upon it in a journal.

5)  Focus your inquiry.  At this point, you should have chosen a topic, reflected upon why the topic is important to you, conducted a cursory literature review, and read one of the landmark scholarly works in the subject area. You should have an idea of where the gaps in the field’s knowledge are, where the points of controversy are, and what some of the applications of the subject knowledge are. Pick an area that intrigues you more than other areas and list some questions that will guide your inquiry. Journal about your choice. 

6)  Work through some current sources.  Find 3 or 4 substantive sources (scholarly books or articles). These sources should be fairly recent: no more than 8-10 years old.

  a) Read and Analyze Texts.  Engage with the texts as you read them. Annotate. Underline. Ask questions. Make connections. This should take significantly more time than you’re used to. You should be able to get at least 2 journals out of each text.

      i)  Don’t underline everything.  There will be a lot of information in these sources. Most of it should be left untouched. Only underline/take notes on the information you need, information that is new and novel, sentences that summarize ideas that the author spends pages explaining, information that you think you’ll use in your own project. There is unlikely to be more than one line per page worth underlining. Come see a research coordinator if you struggle with this.

    ii)  Don’t uncritically accept the author’s assertions.  There is a tendency for young researchers to, when encountering new theories comprehensively set forth, as in scholarly books or journals, to accept them as authoritatively true. Fight this tendency. The author will be very convincing with his writing; he himself believes what he’s saying. But you should maintain a degree of skepticism. There’s no guarantee that even his statistical data is accurate. Continuous questioning of the author’s claims is very important.

  b)  Mine footnotes.   I often find that the best way to find good sources that you might not find otherwise is to looks at other sources’ footnotes. This is essentially taking advantage of an expert’s familiarity of the literature, and often yields better results than a keyword search in a scholarly database, at least for broad research.

  c)  Reflect on the text.  Once you’ve finished reading a text, write about it. Try to summarize the main point or contribution that the author makes. Record any startling facts that you learned, list any questions that you still have, and reflect on what relevance the information you’ve gained from the source will have on your project. How has your own thinking on the subject changed? Try to limit this reflection to 500-750 words.

7)  Work through more sources.  After reading 3 or 4 current texts, further focus your line of inquiry and find some more texts to read and analyze, perhaps from the footnotes of previous sources. Just 4 or 5 sources should be sufficient, but try to ensure that conflicting viewpoints are present. These sources don’t have to be as recent; oftentimes, the older writings will contain more useful truth than the newer ones.

8)  Write.   At this point, you’ve done quite a bit of research. You should also have done quite a bit of writing. But take some time now to really write. Use all of the information you’ve gained, all the thinking you’ve done, and write a substantive essay to elucidate everything you know and think about your subject of study. It’s important that you put a good faith effort into making this as complete as possible. From this essay you’ll be able to see what you still don’t know (and hence what you still need to study), and you should be able to see what you want your own contribution to be. Writing this essay should make your “so what?” clear, and give you a better idea of what your final product will be and what you need to do to build it.

9)  Assess and plan.  Much should be made clear to you through the process of writing your essay in step 8. Read what you’ve written, and sketch out what your next steps will be. More research will be required, but the next set of sources should be chosen much more purposefully. You should have an outline of what information you need to build your final product and you should be searching for that specific information (critically). 

10)  Audentior Ito.

J12 - Economics and Time (Part II)

I had originally planned for this Journal to be an attempt to justify the statement “saving is more economic than consumption.” I say “attempt” because in my notes I couldn’t quite complete the argument; there was something wrong with it, although I didn’t know what. Still, I wanted to at least get my thoughts into a Journal. However, in the course of writing this Journal, the flaw in my argument became obvious. Now this Journal serves as a chronicle of a failure.

In my last Journal I explained that the purpose of an economy is to improve an actor’s future conditions. This definition flows logically from the fact that action is, and must be, future-oriented. Action is always and attempt to bring about better conditions in the future than would come about without the intervention of the actor. The end of an action can only be attained in the future; therefore, the purpose of action is make the future better.

In economic terms, improving one’s conditions generally means increasing one’s consumption ability. That is, the future is improved through the accumulation of wealth, which could be utilized in some future period for the attainment of ends. But an accumulation of wealth can only be acquired through the saving of resources produced today. These saved resources can either be stockpiled or turned into producer’s goods; either way, they become capital and lead to higher levels of possible consumption in the future. Therefore, the future gets better through saving today. 

Because we become wealthier in the future through saving today, and because the purpose of every action is to become “wealthier” in the future, I thought that there must be a way to justify saving as objectively more economic than consumption. 

There were some other parts of economic theory that challenged this proposition. First of all, the end of every action is, in fact, some form of consumption. But I overcame this hurdle by distinguishing between intermediary ends and the ultimate end. Intermediary ends are the things we want, and the ultimate end is why we want them: happiness/satisfaction. So, we desire a specific end, such as a sandwich, but we desire that end because of the effect that having the sandwich will have, because we believe that having the sandwich will make us happier. Since this is the purpose of every action, it seems that the ultimate end is always and forever in the future, out of reach. Indeed, man is always acting, and action is always future-oriented. Therefore, the end of every action is some form of consumption, but this consumption is merely a means for the attainment of the ultimate end of every action, which is always further in the future. 

I also struggled to reconcile my proposition with the existence of time preference, the universal desire to attain a given end sooner rather than later. If we’d rather have things now than later, how could I say that something inherent in action makes postponing consumption more economic than consumption now? But I deflected this challenge by reasoning that even though we’d rather attain our ends immediately, we can’t actually attain our ends in the present. We can only change the future; therefore, despite our time preference, our actions must still be directed toward the future, toward making the future better.

But this justification was incredibly strained, and I knew it. In my notes, I admitted that I might be confusing saving with action generally. But, in writing the first draft of this Journal, I realized that the real problem was that I had misunderstood my own definition. The purpose of action is to make the future better, yes. But I had been sloppy in writing this definition, by leaving off the rest of the description, and careless in building upon this definition, by forgetting the unwritten portion. The key is the word “better”: the purpose of action is not to make the future better than the present, but to make the future better than it would have been without the action. In other words, the purpose of an economy is indeed to create more wealth for tomorrow so that we can consume more tomorrow. But this difference in wealth is not between tomorrow and today, but between two theoretical tomorrow-states. My definitions weren’t wrong, just dangerously vague. 

To be clear: action is an attempt to make the actor’s future better than it would be without the action. Action is a choice between different future states. The present cannot be changed. Acting man does not compare the future with the present; he compares different possible futures and selects the one he expects will bring him the most satisfaction. Whatever the specific end of a specific action is, the end is always a change in future conditions. The end is always a future in which the conditions are more favorable than they would have been without the actor’s action. 

I, personally, would prefer a future where I am wealthier than I am today. But acting for the realization of that desired future state is a choice, a value judgment. It cannot be objectively justified. Saving is not more economic than consumption. Of course, neither is consumption more economic than saving. Whether an action is economic or not is determined by the profitability of the action, which in turn is determined by the value attributed to the end attained and the end forgone. As these values are inherently subjective, so is the choice between saving and consumption.