J37 - Note Ramblings

I really don’t have time to write now, because I have so much other stuff to do, but I can’t get anything else done because I feel like I really have to write. I’ve got too much clutter in my mind; I need to draw the thoughts out. So, this journal’s only purpose is to help me clear my head, so it might end up being random and messy and irrelevant. We’ll be back to our regular programming shortly. [Normally this sort of thing would stay in my notes, but it’s a problem I’m currently grappling with and I want it published so that I can consider it against the background of my other thinking this year, which is better synthesized on this site than in my notes.]

One of the really big projects that I’ve been (supposedly) working on this year is writing an academic journal article, called a “Note,” as part of my membership of the Albany Law Journal of Science and Technology. Technically, I should have been working on this article all year, submitting five pages at a time to my supervisor as evidence of progress at predetermined checkpoints. But, that’s not really how I work. I like to use large blocks of time (like 12 hours) to start and finish projects in one or two sittings. I really don’t even know how one would write a paper one page at a time, one page each week, or whatever the schedule I was given works out to. As a compromise, I submitted an outline of my entire paper to my supervisor at the beginning of the year, and was waived from having to show anything at any of the deadlines between then and now. However, one of the two deadlines I was not exempted from, when a draft of my full paper is due, is approaching rapidly. Here’s the thing: I no longer want to write the same paper. My research and thinking since the beginning of the year for this paper and generally look nothing like the stuff I put in the outline. It’s not a huge problem, I think, to deviate from an outline I crafted months and months ago. But it is difficult to stare a deadline in the face and not even have an outline to follow in writing 25 pages for that deadline. I need to rethink what I want this Note to be. There’s a lot of things I’d like to write about, of course. But I also need to find a way to connect it all back to law, and that’s more difficult for me, as I spend all of my free time thinking and reading and writing in subjects like economics and education and philosophy, not law. These subjects are all related, of course, but I need to work hard on making the connections solid and explicit, and to have the law appear to be the focus of the writing, rather than a support of the actual focus.

It’s an amazing moment, when a period of sustained study suddenly culminates in a flash of insight that somehow makes all the academic slogging seem worth it. In my senior year of college, I really threw myself into the study of monetary economics. It was always part of the subject that I struggled with; I was interested in human beings, not numbers and equations, so I naturally struggled to focus in classes that dealt with such aspects of economic science. But, I felt that it was necessary to be conversant in all areas of economics before I graduated with a degree in it. So, most of my personal studying during my senior year was dedicated to the money problem. Through this study, I could tell that something was missing in most of the standard discussions of the subject. This is a common feeling for me. But, until I understand the rest of the discussion, I can’t see what exactly is missing. When I do come to understand the rest, the flash of insight that accompanies it is the realization of what was missing. And that’s an amazing experience. Such a realization provided the inspiration for my senior thesis.  When I originally applied to write a senior thesis, the department chair rejected all of my proposed topics because they seemed too literature-reviewish. I explained that I was analyzing and critiquing others’ theories, rather than analyzing new data with those theories; I wanted my paper to be a theoretical contribution, rather than an empirical one like everyone else’s (most senior theses are just regressions of new data sets and explanation of the findings). The department chair explained that real economic theory was just math, and there wasn’t any math in my proposals. So, rejected. Then I kind of faked people out by submitting a proposal for a paper entitled “The Redistributive Effects of Monetary Inflation,” which could have been an empirical paper if any other student was writing it. Instead, it contained no numbers, and explained that all the math in monetary economics entirely ignored the process of reality and thus, while formally true, had no applicability to the real world.

Similarly, during my summer as a fellow, when I was teaching grad students about the history of economic thought, much of time was spent preparing lecture notes rather than researching new topics in economics. But, I was reading and writing a lot, and, again, I noticed that there was some sort of disconnect in the literature, and I was low-key trying to figure it out all summer. A 3-credit course works out to be about 45 lecture hours (not that you really get to use all of them). For my class, I allocated an hour-and-a-half to economists before Cantillon, three hours to Adam Smith and the other Classical economists, an hour-and-a-half to Marx, and three hours to J.B. Say and the Physiocrats. Nine hours down, right? The next nine hours were all spent on the Marginal Revolution, the birth of modern economics. Nine hours on three economists. And I spent all this time on this period because I felt that the lessons from this revolution had still not been fully absorbed by the economics community. But, during these lectures, I felt that there was actually tension even among the marginalists. Of course, Menger and Walras used different methods, but there was something else, too. Back to that in a moment...my flash of insight from all this work was the realization that the real contribution from Menger was not just that agents operate on the margin, but that the mind is the source of goods-classification and that, as a result, all of economics was actually a product of the mind and occurred therein. This lent itself to my original project this year, which had as its premise the idea that climate change was not merely an economics problem, but a perspective problem. 

My work this year, which spanned many different topics, depending on which hat I was wearing at the time, really came down to a study of what it means to be human and possess a human mind. And, through it all, I was looking for what was missing from other discussions of the topic. And I learned so much, discovered so much, grew so much. My work as a coordinator, designing and implementing a class that rejects the classic public school paradigm and seeks to improve the cognitive abilities and critical faculties of students on a voluntary basis, I came to understand the level of ignorance in all people and the need for humility in the learning process. As a mentor and advisor for students in the class, I more fully developed my Theory of Black and White, which I think will be one of my more significant contributions in my life, the idea that everything exists on a spectrum, despite the human tendency to think in absolutes. My study of being human taught me the significance of society in the rational processes of man. My study of the price system helped me realize that there are not different economic systems, just different levels of intervention in the natural one. I could go on and on about other things, such as the constancy of change, the epistemic barriers to justifiable legislation, the importance of questioning, and the ubiquity of market processes. One of the most important things I realized is that what separates the Austrian School from neoclassical economics is its doctrine of economic action, as opposed to economic equilibrium or nonaction. It’s not that Austrians study man as if he is a man, it’s that Austrians study man as if he is living a life, as if he is a being with purpose. Like I said, just tons of insights from working so hard in so many different subjects, and seeing their interconnectedness. [You can see why I broadened by topic to the study of human beings generally.]

Now, how do I incorporate this new discoveries which so dominate my thinking now that they’ve all illuminated my every thought into a freaking law review article? They are surely applicable to law, but they’re all so new to me that I haven’t even finished fleshing them out into their own articles of exposition. I don’t know if they’re ready to support an original analysis of a legal problem, especially when I have not written the articles I need to cite to if my law paper is to avoid becoming just a massive explication of these new concepts. 

Originally, my Note was going to be about the effect of judicial language on the public perception of climate change, as a way of connecting my Note to my EMC2 project. As you know, my EMC2 project has changed, and thus I think my Note should, too. But, I don’t want to stray too far from my original plan. I think that now the Note will be kind of about the effect of judicial language on public perception of change, or maybe about the conceit of judges in thinking that they can decide complex issues. I mean, specifically in the environmental context, there’s a lot of judicial deference to regulators because, after all, the EPA is full of scientists who are experts on the environment, while the courts are not. But, the judges are actually passing judgment on environmental issues, by deciding who should handle them. On the one hand, the judges are pleading ignorance about a subject, and at the same time indicating that another group of people possess enough knowledge on a subject to make all the decisions necessary. But, as my studies have shown this year, there is no group of people who could possibly know enough about a problem to justify regulating the world in an attempt to fix it. Same thing with economic legislation. [See the language of the Nebbia case, which put an end to the Lochner era of economic freedom in the United States.] It might also be worth considering the natural law method of adjudication versus the modern approach of statutory interpretation. However, my advisor for this paper is an environmental law guy, so my options are somewhat limited.

Of course, having a general idea about a problem with judicial opinions is a lot different than writing a detailed research paper articulating and defending such a broad critique. I’ve got a lot of research into regulations and such before I can begin to piece together a substantive argument. And I need to publish a few articles to cite to so that my arguments don’t seem unsupported (law has this annoying practice where every single assertion needs a citation). And, of course, this critique is not one that’s only applicable to judicial opinions. And this idea is still rather amorphous, subject to change in the writing process. It might just turn into a general criticism of regulations, which I think would be unwise in terms of feasibility (page count and research). It doesn’t help that there are so many other projects to work on and ideas to think about. Alright, I might be whining now, so I’ll sign off.