David D. Friedman's Blog, page 25
June 21, 2011
Caplan Contra Krugman: A Very Clever Post
Paul Krugman has recently been claiming that people on the left understand the views of those on the right much better than people on the right understand the views of those on the left. As Bryan Caplan argues in his response, this partly hinges on the fact that Krugman is comparing left wing academics to right wing polemicists. If instead you compare how well libertarian economists can reproduce Keynesian arguments with how well Keynesian economists can reproduce libertarian arguments, the conclusion might well reverse.
The clever thing about Bryan's response is that he proposes an objective test of the question, a sort of ideological Turing test.
The clever thing about Bryan's response is that he proposes an objective test of the question, a sort of ideological Turing test.
Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a libertarian. Simple as that.If provided with sufficient funding, redo the experiment using economists, using political philosophers, replacing libertarians (or liberals) with conservatives. Generate some actual empirical evidence of who understands whose arguments well enough to defend them, which is arguably important, even essential, evidence of understanding them well enough to be justified in rejecting them.
Puzzles of the Linked Web
In the course of poking around to see who is referring to my blog posts, downloading stuff from my web page, and the like, I've encountered a couple of puzzles, and it occurred to me that some of my readers may know much more about the subject than I do.
The first came when I followed the link at the bottom of my web page to usage statistics provided by my ISP. One of them is "Top 100 of 4635 Total Referrers." Reading down them, I noticed a lot of what looked like pornographic URL's, mixed in with less exotic and more obviously relevant ones:
http://hot-asses.brunettes4u.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/06/murray-rothbard-on-me-and-vice-versa.html
http://www.google.co.in/url
http://www.youngblackpussy.info/black-booty/
http://my-naked-ex-girlfriend.hotnakedgirlfriends.com/
http://www.google.com/m/search
http://nudecelebsfree.info/
Naturally, I clicked on some of them. And ended up looking not at pictures of hot naked girlfriends but at a respectable, innocuous, indeed dull page offering information on online education. I tried clicking on some more and ended up, each time, in the same place. It doesn't work if I click on a URL that looks as though it might actually belong there—only the pornographic ones.
My only guess so far at what is going on is that traffic is being steered to the respectable page by the use of what look like unrespectable URL's, somehow forwarded to the respectable URL when you click on them. But surely there must be a more plausible explanation.
My second puzzle is less exotic. I did a Google search for the title of our POD cookbook and got a surprisingly large number of hits. But when I clicked on one and searched the page for a word from the title, it was not there—there was no reference at all to the book. That was not the case for all of the hits, but it was for a surprisingly large number.
The pattern was not random. The pages I was finding were not pages likely to talk about a medieval & renaissance cookbook. But they were pages likely to link to my blog—largely libertarian or libertarian related pages. In some cases, the date of the page predated the cookbook by several years.
My current guess is that those pages had links to something that had once appeared on my blog. Somehow, when I started posting to the blog about the cookbook, something changed, sending Google a (mistaken) signal that the links were going to those posts.
Can anyone offer a clearer or more plausible explanation of what I'm seeing? Is there a good webbed discussion of this stuff somewhere?
The first came when I followed the link at the bottom of my web page to usage statistics provided by my ISP. One of them is "Top 100 of 4635 Total Referrers." Reading down them, I noticed a lot of what looked like pornographic URL's, mixed in with less exotic and more obviously relevant ones:
http://hot-asses.brunettes4u.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/06/murray-rothbard-on-me-and-vice-versa.html
http://www.google.co.in/url
http://www.youngblackpussy.info/black-booty/
http://my-naked-ex-girlfriend.hotnakedgirlfriends.com/
http://www.google.com/m/search
http://nudecelebsfree.info/
Naturally, I clicked on some of them. And ended up looking not at pictures of hot naked girlfriends but at a respectable, innocuous, indeed dull page offering information on online education. I tried clicking on some more and ended up, each time, in the same place. It doesn't work if I click on a URL that looks as though it might actually belong there—only the pornographic ones.
My only guess so far at what is going on is that traffic is being steered to the respectable page by the use of what look like unrespectable URL's, somehow forwarded to the respectable URL when you click on them. But surely there must be a more plausible explanation.
My second puzzle is less exotic. I did a Google search for the title of our POD cookbook and got a surprisingly large number of hits. But when I clicked on one and searched the page for a word from the title, it was not there—there was no reference at all to the book. That was not the case for all of the hits, but it was for a surprisingly large number.
The pattern was not random. The pages I was finding were not pages likely to talk about a medieval & renaissance cookbook. But they were pages likely to link to my blog—largely libertarian or libertarian related pages. In some cases, the date of the page predated the cookbook by several years.
My current guess is that those pages had links to something that had once appeared on my blog. Somehow, when I started posting to the blog about the cookbook, something changed, sending Google a (mistaken) signal that the links were going to those posts.
Can anyone offer a clearer or more plausible explanation of what I'm seeing? Is there a good webbed discussion of this stuff somewhere?
June 20, 2011
Some POD Details
As many readers know, my wife and I currently have a medieval and renaissance cookbook up as a Print On Demand paperback from Amazon's CreateSpace subsidiary. Now that it is there, it occurs to me that there is an interesting tradeoff associated with where we choose to sell it.
Selling directly from the CreateSpace bookstore gives us the highest royalty. On the other hand, such sales do not appear to register in the book's Amazon ranking or give purchasers an opportunity to post reviews on the book's Amazon page, unlike sales made directly through Amazon. So perhaps it would be more prudent, at least for a while, to point people at the book's Amazon page instead.
On the third hand, CreateSpace does, and Amazon, so far as I can tell, does not, provide a mechanism by which we can discount the book to resellers. So perhaps we should point resellers at CreateSpace, everyone else at Amazon.
Selling directly from the CreateSpace bookstore gives us the highest royalty. On the other hand, such sales do not appear to register in the book's Amazon ranking or give purchasers an opportunity to post reviews on the book's Amazon page, unlike sales made directly through Amazon. So perhaps it would be more prudent, at least for a while, to point people at the book's Amazon page instead.
On the third hand, CreateSpace does, and Amazon, so far as I can tell, does not, provide a mechanism by which we can discount the book to resellers. So perhaps we should point resellers at CreateSpace, everyone else at Amazon.
Thoughts on the Economics of Self-Publishing
Apropos of my recent posts, some thoughts and numbers.
A Kindle at $2.95 pays about $2/copy in royalties—one consequence of the fact that the cost of making and delivering one more copy is close to zero. My Salamander seems to be selling about two copies a day at this point, and it looks as though the rate is drifting up despite no serious further promotion by me, possibly as positive word of mouth spreads. Suppose I assume, optimistically, that it makes it to ten copies a day, hardly a best seller. It could maintain such a rate for a very long time without significantly reducing the pool of potential fantasy readers who had not yet read it.The result would be an income stream of about seven thousand dollars a year—not wealth, but a sizable trickle for someone willing to live at a starving artist level. For an author who could add one more book each year to the inventory, the trickle would be growing.
What about the POD alternative? How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes is available on CreateSpace for $9, paying us about $4 in royalties for each copy sold—less for copies sold through Amazon and only about a dollar for any copies sold through brick and mortar stores. As best I can tell it has so far sold about three copies. My guess, from past self-publishing experience within the medieval recreation hobby, is that we can expect to eventually sell a thousand or so into that market, probably over a period of several years. Again a significant amount of money, but nothing close to enough for an author to live on, at least in this part of the world.
The critical step in order to make it a source of income as well as a way of spreading information on historical cooking would be to break into the wider world of cookbooks. I have so far sent out one review copy to a major newspaper that provided me with an address to send it to, several to web sites that review cookbooks. My guess is that a single favorable review in a major source would multiply sales several fold, but that's only a guess.
All of which suggests to me one further development that might help replacement the traditional publishing model with one centered on self-publication of eBooks and online POD's.
Currently, the main job of an author's agent is to sell his book to a publisher—first to persuade an editor to accept it and then to negotiate a contract. If we cut the publisher out of the loop neither sale nor contract remains, so it looks as though the agents as well as the publishers are out of a job.
But perhaps not. The publisher's traditional job included not only physical production and sale but also providing various inputs to the creation of a work for which the author was not the best source. The publisher found a cover artist. The publisher provided an editor and hired, or contracted the services of, a copyeditor. The publisher knew whom to send proof copies to in the hope of favorable reviews. All of these jobs will still need to be done, even if the problems of physical production and distribution are eliminated by modern technology.
The best editorial advice I ever got was not from an editor but from my current agent. She went over the first chapter of Hidden Order in detail, suggesting ways of revising it to do a better job of attracting the interest and attention of a reader. It became my most successful book. The same agent went over Salamander well before we had decided to put it up as a Kindle. I accepted some of her suggestions, rejected others—but it ended up a better book as a result.
Perhaps what will and should happen is a shift of function from publisher to agent. Let the agent be an expert not in selling books to publishers but in helping authors write their books—part of what agents already do. That might include editorial advice. It might include pointing authors at competent free-lance editors and copy editors willing to sell their services. It might mean accumulating an acquaintance not among acquisition editors but among book reviewers, the proprietors of blogs that might be persuaded to recommend books, and a range of other people through whom favorable word of a new self-published book could be spread. It might mean developing mailing lists for sending out review copies, lists tailored to a variety of different sorts of books.
One final thought on the Kindle market, formed after looking at Amazon's list of the top hundred sellers. To my surprise, most of them appeared to be in about the $5-$10 range, inexpensive for a paperback but not for a computer file that costs almost nothing to produce. Possibly too expensive for a book targeted at customers whose first purchase will be more or less an act of faith, since they have no evidence that a commercial publisher thought the book worth publishing.
Which started me wondering about the pattern of price changes. Perhaps what is happening, perhaps what ought to happen, is price discrimination over time. Put your Kindle up at a nominal price—$2.95, $.99, perhaps for free. Leave it up at that price until it accumulates a significant number of sales and positive reviews. Then raise the price to something more like what people expect to pay for an ordinary paperback book. Ten copies a day at $10 a copy comes to royalties in the neighborhood of $25,000/year. Get a few more books up on those terms, move to somewhere with good weather and low living costs, and retire to a life of comfort.
George Orwell comments somewhere that the 19th century was the great time for authors, when successful ones could live well on the revenue from book sales, free of past dependence on aristocratic patrons or future dependence on state patronage. To a significant degree we are still in that world, although I am, in my interaction with fellow authors, struck by how many of them seem more able to write books worth reading than to support themselves by doing so.
Things may be about to get a good deal better.
A Kindle at $2.95 pays about $2/copy in royalties—one consequence of the fact that the cost of making and delivering one more copy is close to zero. My Salamander seems to be selling about two copies a day at this point, and it looks as though the rate is drifting up despite no serious further promotion by me, possibly as positive word of mouth spreads. Suppose I assume, optimistically, that it makes it to ten copies a day, hardly a best seller. It could maintain such a rate for a very long time without significantly reducing the pool of potential fantasy readers who had not yet read it.The result would be an income stream of about seven thousand dollars a year—not wealth, but a sizable trickle for someone willing to live at a starving artist level. For an author who could add one more book each year to the inventory, the trickle would be growing.
What about the POD alternative? How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes is available on CreateSpace for $9, paying us about $4 in royalties for each copy sold—less for copies sold through Amazon and only about a dollar for any copies sold through brick and mortar stores. As best I can tell it has so far sold about three copies. My guess, from past self-publishing experience within the medieval recreation hobby, is that we can expect to eventually sell a thousand or so into that market, probably over a period of several years. Again a significant amount of money, but nothing close to enough for an author to live on, at least in this part of the world.
The critical step in order to make it a source of income as well as a way of spreading information on historical cooking would be to break into the wider world of cookbooks. I have so far sent out one review copy to a major newspaper that provided me with an address to send it to, several to web sites that review cookbooks. My guess is that a single favorable review in a major source would multiply sales several fold, but that's only a guess.
All of which suggests to me one further development that might help replacement the traditional publishing model with one centered on self-publication of eBooks and online POD's.
Currently, the main job of an author's agent is to sell his book to a publisher—first to persuade an editor to accept it and then to negotiate a contract. If we cut the publisher out of the loop neither sale nor contract remains, so it looks as though the agents as well as the publishers are out of a job.
But perhaps not. The publisher's traditional job included not only physical production and sale but also providing various inputs to the creation of a work for which the author was not the best source. The publisher found a cover artist. The publisher provided an editor and hired, or contracted the services of, a copyeditor. The publisher knew whom to send proof copies to in the hope of favorable reviews. All of these jobs will still need to be done, even if the problems of physical production and distribution are eliminated by modern technology.
The best editorial advice I ever got was not from an editor but from my current agent. She went over the first chapter of Hidden Order in detail, suggesting ways of revising it to do a better job of attracting the interest and attention of a reader. It became my most successful book. The same agent went over Salamander well before we had decided to put it up as a Kindle. I accepted some of her suggestions, rejected others—but it ended up a better book as a result.
Perhaps what will and should happen is a shift of function from publisher to agent. Let the agent be an expert not in selling books to publishers but in helping authors write their books—part of what agents already do. That might include editorial advice. It might include pointing authors at competent free-lance editors and copy editors willing to sell their services. It might mean accumulating an acquaintance not among acquisition editors but among book reviewers, the proprietors of blogs that might be persuaded to recommend books, and a range of other people through whom favorable word of a new self-published book could be spread. It might mean developing mailing lists for sending out review copies, lists tailored to a variety of different sorts of books.
One final thought on the Kindle market, formed after looking at Amazon's list of the top hundred sellers. To my surprise, most of them appeared to be in about the $5-$10 range, inexpensive for a paperback but not for a computer file that costs almost nothing to produce. Possibly too expensive for a book targeted at customers whose first purchase will be more or less an act of faith, since they have no evidence that a commercial publisher thought the book worth publishing.
Which started me wondering about the pattern of price changes. Perhaps what is happening, perhaps what ought to happen, is price discrimination over time. Put your Kindle up at a nominal price—$2.95, $.99, perhaps for free. Leave it up at that price until it accumulates a significant number of sales and positive reviews. Then raise the price to something more like what people expect to pay for an ordinary paperback book. Ten copies a day at $10 a copy comes to royalties in the neighborhood of $25,000/year. Get a few more books up on those terms, move to somewhere with good weather and low living costs, and retire to a life of comfort.
George Orwell comments somewhere that the 19th century was the great time for authors, when successful ones could live well on the revenue from book sales, free of past dependence on aristocratic patrons or future dependence on state patronage. To a significant degree we are still in that world, although I am, in my interaction with fellow authors, struck by how many of them seem more able to write books worth reading than to support themselves by doing so.
Things may be about to get a good deal better.
June 18, 2011
Bitcoins Considered as Virtual Gold
A commodity money, such as circulating gold coins, has two substantial advantages and two substantial disadvantages in comparison to other forms of money. The first advantage is that it is less dependent on information and trust. Gold was, until modern times, by a substantial margin the densest known metal, and it has several other distinctive characteristics, making it reasonably straightforward to distinguish gold from gold plated lead or even from gold that has been seriously debased by alloys. The value of a commodity gold coin depends on fineness and weight, and weight is easy to measure. So it was practical, indeed common, for multiple issues from multiple sources to circulate together, exchanging at rates determined by relative gold content. Knowing that a coin was from a reliable mint was convenient, but not essential.
The second advantage is that a commodity currency is less subject to manipulation than a fiat currency, whether token coins, such as most currently circulating coinage, or paper money. The issuer of a fiat money can manipulate its value either as a source of income—financing government spending via the printing press rather than taxation—or for other purposes. Inflating a currency benefits debtors, including indebted governments, at the expense of creditors; one reason for Greece's current problems is that, without a currency of its own, it does not have the option of that form of de facto default. And manipulation of the money supply can be used for other political purposes, such as temporarily lowering the unemployment rate via an unanticipated expansion. Thus the value of a fiat currency is potentially less predictable than the value of a commodity currency, and predictable value is an important feature of the currency in which parties contract for future payments.
The flip side of this advantage, however, is that the value of a commodity currency is determined by external factors which may themselves be difficult to predict, especially over the long term. New gold discoveries, improvements in the technology for extracting gold from ore, changes in non-monetary demand for gold, all can result in changes in future price levels that are not easily anticipated. Thus the value of a commodity money is less predictable than would be the value of a fiat money controlled by competent and benevolent agents.
The other disadvantage of a commodity money is that someone has to produce the commodity. Labor and capital are expended in locating and mining gold, a real cost. David Ricardo, writing about two hundred years ago, pointed out that a tax on gold mines whose output was used entirely as money in the taxing country and provided all of its money was a burden-free tax—not only did it impose no excess burden (cost to taxpayers above receipts to government), it imposed no burden at all. A smaller amount of gold was mined but the value per ounce was greater, resulting in the same total value of gold money at a lower production cost—and it is the value, not the weight, of money that mostly determines its usefulness. Fiat money represents the limiting case, where "production cost" is in effect all tax.
There is, as I have discussed elsewhere, at least one interesting and attractive intermediate case: A private fractional reserve money. Its value is determined by the value of the commodity on which it is based, so behaves like the value of a pure commodity money; the one difference is that monetary demand plays a lower role, with each ounce of gold supporting the equivalent of multiple ounces of currency. And, for the same reason, it sharply reduces the cost of providing a monetary system compared to the cost with commodity money. But, unlike a pure commodity system, it does depend on trust and information, on being reasonably confident both that your bank note was really issued by the bank it claims to be from and that that bank can be trusted to pay off on its promises.
The reason to raise these issues now is the appearance of bitcoins, a private, decentralized system of anonymous online currency. I have been interested in the subject of anonymous ecash for many years but have no particular expertise in the current incarnation; readers who do are invited to correct any errors in my account.
Bitcoins, as I understand them, are, like gold, mined—not with pick and shovel but with computer power. Each consists of a piece of information which requires a considerable input of computing power to generate. In equilibrium the value of one bitcoin tends to the cost of producing it, just as the value of an ounce of gold tends to its production cost. Thus, like a commodity currency, bitcoins consume real resources in their production. And their value has both the advantage and disadvantage of a commodity money—not subject to deliberate manipulation, but vulnerable to changes from external causes such as reductions in the cost of computing power or mathematical improvements that make it easier to deduce the information used to create one. Like a gold coin, a bit coin can be tested for validity by the user—a process that involves both a check of its mathematical characteristics and the use of decentralized mechanisms to prevent the double spending problem.
The details of how the bitcoin system works should be findable elsewhere online. While I have an avocational interest in the relevant mathematics, I am not an expert in it, so thought it more useful to focus on the economics.
The second advantage is that a commodity currency is less subject to manipulation than a fiat currency, whether token coins, such as most currently circulating coinage, or paper money. The issuer of a fiat money can manipulate its value either as a source of income—financing government spending via the printing press rather than taxation—or for other purposes. Inflating a currency benefits debtors, including indebted governments, at the expense of creditors; one reason for Greece's current problems is that, without a currency of its own, it does not have the option of that form of de facto default. And manipulation of the money supply can be used for other political purposes, such as temporarily lowering the unemployment rate via an unanticipated expansion. Thus the value of a fiat currency is potentially less predictable than the value of a commodity currency, and predictable value is an important feature of the currency in which parties contract for future payments.
The flip side of this advantage, however, is that the value of a commodity currency is determined by external factors which may themselves be difficult to predict, especially over the long term. New gold discoveries, improvements in the technology for extracting gold from ore, changes in non-monetary demand for gold, all can result in changes in future price levels that are not easily anticipated. Thus the value of a commodity money is less predictable than would be the value of a fiat money controlled by competent and benevolent agents.
The other disadvantage of a commodity money is that someone has to produce the commodity. Labor and capital are expended in locating and mining gold, a real cost. David Ricardo, writing about two hundred years ago, pointed out that a tax on gold mines whose output was used entirely as money in the taxing country and provided all of its money was a burden-free tax—not only did it impose no excess burden (cost to taxpayers above receipts to government), it imposed no burden at all. A smaller amount of gold was mined but the value per ounce was greater, resulting in the same total value of gold money at a lower production cost—and it is the value, not the weight, of money that mostly determines its usefulness. Fiat money represents the limiting case, where "production cost" is in effect all tax.
There is, as I have discussed elsewhere, at least one interesting and attractive intermediate case: A private fractional reserve money. Its value is determined by the value of the commodity on which it is based, so behaves like the value of a pure commodity money; the one difference is that monetary demand plays a lower role, with each ounce of gold supporting the equivalent of multiple ounces of currency. And, for the same reason, it sharply reduces the cost of providing a monetary system compared to the cost with commodity money. But, unlike a pure commodity system, it does depend on trust and information, on being reasonably confident both that your bank note was really issued by the bank it claims to be from and that that bank can be trusted to pay off on its promises.
The reason to raise these issues now is the appearance of bitcoins, a private, decentralized system of anonymous online currency. I have been interested in the subject of anonymous ecash for many years but have no particular expertise in the current incarnation; readers who do are invited to correct any errors in my account.
Bitcoins, as I understand them, are, like gold, mined—not with pick and shovel but with computer power. Each consists of a piece of information which requires a considerable input of computing power to generate. In equilibrium the value of one bitcoin tends to the cost of producing it, just as the value of an ounce of gold tends to its production cost. Thus, like a commodity currency, bitcoins consume real resources in their production. And their value has both the advantage and disadvantage of a commodity money—not subject to deliberate manipulation, but vulnerable to changes from external causes such as reductions in the cost of computing power or mathematical improvements that make it easier to deduce the information used to create one. Like a gold coin, a bit coin can be tested for validity by the user—a process that involves both a check of its mathematical characteristics and the use of decentralized mechanisms to prevent the double spending problem.
The details of how the bitcoin system works should be findable elsewhere online. While I have an avocational interest in the relevant mathematics, I am not an expert in it, so thought it more useful to focus on the economics.
Lessons from Writing My First Novels
My first novel, Harald, was published by Baen in 2006; my second, Salamander, has recently appeared on Amazon as a kindle file. I've commented in earlier posts on it as an experiment in self-publishing. Currently it has four reviews, all very positive. The most recent is also perceptive—the reviewer picks up on a somewhat subtle point in one scene that I was afraid readers would miss. Since my purpose in publishing novels is mostly to get readers, not to get income, that's encouraging. The book's Amazon rating has been reaching about 20,000 repeatedly, then sliding away, then going back. My very rough guess is that 20,000 represents a sales rate of about two copies a day. According to email from my agent, who is the one who actually put it up for me, sales have totaled about 25 copies so far, with the rate of sales drifting upwards.
Quite aside from the self-publishing issue or the broader issue of distributing intellectual property online, often for free, I found the process of writing my first two novels an interesting and educational one and thought some of my readers might be interested. There were at least two lessons:
1. World building often feels more like discovery than invention.
I had a minor technical problem in Harald, a character who needed to learn a language implausibly fast. I found a solution. He had grown up in an environment where the high status people (he is the Emperor's grandson) spoke the equivalent of Latin but the common people spoke the local language, so he was moderately familiar with, although probably not fluent in, the latter. He is now a hostage in a still independent part of the cultural area that the Empire conquered part of a few generations back, so the local language is similar to the one around him when he was growing up, so not too hard for him to learn.
At which point I suddenly realized that I had solved two problems in the plot that I did not know were there, and the whole story made more sense. The Emperor has been trying to conquer the remaining unconquered area for the past thirty years and failing, due to the military genius of my protagonist and the political abilities of the king he is allied to. The Emperor is a sensible fellow: Why doesn't he give up on that project and go conquer something else? Answer: As long as Kaerlia remains independent and demonstrates its ability to defend itself, the territories conquered seventy years earlier are at risk; they might decide they could do it too.
Second question: The Emperor has two sons, both of whom apparently want to succeed him, and has been keeping both in play, to some extent playing them off against each other. He's old, competent, and responsible; why doesn't he simplify the situation and eliminate the risk of a civil war when he dies by naming an heir? It is especially a puzzle given that he clearly (and correctly) regards the younger son as the abler, and the younger son also has the loyalty of the Empire's best general.
Answer: The imperial aristocracy is polygynous—the two sons have different mothers. The elder's mother is from the imperial high aristocracy, so he has the support of the old families and a dominant position in the eastern (chief) capital. The younger son's mother is from the old royalty of the conquered area; that's why he grew up in the (new) western province where their language was the local language. So the son has the loyalty of the conquered aristocracy, which I assume has been pushed one level down but is still locally powerful. One way of discouraging revolt is to make it clear to the local elite that one of their people might be the next Emperor. The Emperor wants to hold the loyalty of both factions for as long as possible before committing himself to an heir, preferably the younger.
I have long argued that humans have pattern recognition software so good that it can find patterns that aren't there; one might take this as an example. I found it an interesting one. None of this was planned, but it all fell neatly into place
2. No plot survives contact with the characters.
In Harald, as first plotted and told as bedtime stories to my daughter, there was a minor character named Anne, the young king's mistress. The King's competent father has died, and he has a dangerously unrealistic view of how to do the job. Harald, who is a very good story teller as well as a very talented military commander, uses her to feed his view of the situation to the circle of young adults around the king, in order to put pressure on him to change his policies.
By the time the final draft was written, Anne had morphed into my stealth heroine—the noblewoman the King was courting, who makes it clear to him that she think he is acting very badly and she isn't going to marry him as long as he continues to do so, who helps save the situation at one point by a risky and heroic act (riding out of the king's army to one commanded in part by her father, just before the battle starts, to prevent the latter from being tricked into fighting the former), marries the king after he has reversed his policy, gets captured by the Empire when the castle she is in falls, and escapes by a piece of elegant cleverness of the same order as what my protagonist has been using to beat the empire in his campaigns.
In Salamander, the original plot involved a conflict between a good/bad mage (well intentioned but naive), a bad/bad mage (manipulating the good/bad one), and a good mage—very powerful, generally believed to be long dead. It ended with a confrontation between the good mage and the good/bad mage, won by the former.
By the time the book was written, the good mage had become a secondary character, his daughter had shown up as a student at the college where the other two mages teach, and she and the good/bad mage had become the protagonists. The good/bad mage sees the error of his ways fairly early on (the bad/bad mage having died due to an unexpected glitch in the magical procedure being developed by the good/bad mage) and joins forces with father and daughter. The remaining conflicts are between the three of them and other people who want to use the good/bad mage's invention for their own purposes, good and bad.
I had also discovered two different romances developing, one between two intellectuals (good/bad mage and daughter) and one between two highly intelligent practical people (daughter's best friend and heir to the kingdom who is courting her and trying to get control over the mage's invention for well meaning but not necessarily correct reasons). A very different plot, but one I was happy with.
And the book had developed a secondary political theme: In what sense ends justify means. The Prince is basically a good guy willing to do bad things, including killing innocent people, for sufficiently important purposes. And prepared to say so.
(the "circumstances" are that he is a widower, Mari's father is a very high ranking noble, and both suspect that her father plans to marry her to him—a prospect not unattractive to either of them. She's both beautiful and smart. And the best friend of Ellen, the daughter, who is the person they are talking about.)
Do readers find this sort of thing interesting? It's not very close to what I usually post on—but then, part of the idea of this blog is as a place where I can talk about whatever I feel like.
Quite aside from the self-publishing issue or the broader issue of distributing intellectual property online, often for free, I found the process of writing my first two novels an interesting and educational one and thought some of my readers might be interested. There were at least two lessons:
1. World building often feels more like discovery than invention.
I had a minor technical problem in Harald, a character who needed to learn a language implausibly fast. I found a solution. He had grown up in an environment where the high status people (he is the Emperor's grandson) spoke the equivalent of Latin but the common people spoke the local language, so he was moderately familiar with, although probably not fluent in, the latter. He is now a hostage in a still independent part of the cultural area that the Empire conquered part of a few generations back, so the local language is similar to the one around him when he was growing up, so not too hard for him to learn.
At which point I suddenly realized that I had solved two problems in the plot that I did not know were there, and the whole story made more sense. The Emperor has been trying to conquer the remaining unconquered area for the past thirty years and failing, due to the military genius of my protagonist and the political abilities of the king he is allied to. The Emperor is a sensible fellow: Why doesn't he give up on that project and go conquer something else? Answer: As long as Kaerlia remains independent and demonstrates its ability to defend itself, the territories conquered seventy years earlier are at risk; they might decide they could do it too.
Second question: The Emperor has two sons, both of whom apparently want to succeed him, and has been keeping both in play, to some extent playing them off against each other. He's old, competent, and responsible; why doesn't he simplify the situation and eliminate the risk of a civil war when he dies by naming an heir? It is especially a puzzle given that he clearly (and correctly) regards the younger son as the abler, and the younger son also has the loyalty of the Empire's best general.
Answer: The imperial aristocracy is polygynous—the two sons have different mothers. The elder's mother is from the imperial high aristocracy, so he has the support of the old families and a dominant position in the eastern (chief) capital. The younger son's mother is from the old royalty of the conquered area; that's why he grew up in the (new) western province where their language was the local language. So the son has the loyalty of the conquered aristocracy, which I assume has been pushed one level down but is still locally powerful. One way of discouraging revolt is to make it clear to the local elite that one of their people might be the next Emperor. The Emperor wants to hold the loyalty of both factions for as long as possible before committing himself to an heir, preferably the younger.
I have long argued that humans have pattern recognition software so good that it can find patterns that aren't there; one might take this as an example. I found it an interesting one. None of this was planned, but it all fell neatly into place
2. No plot survives contact with the characters.
In Harald, as first plotted and told as bedtime stories to my daughter, there was a minor character named Anne, the young king's mistress. The King's competent father has died, and he has a dangerously unrealistic view of how to do the job. Harald, who is a very good story teller as well as a very talented military commander, uses her to feed his view of the situation to the circle of young adults around the king, in order to put pressure on him to change his policies.
By the time the final draft was written, Anne had morphed into my stealth heroine—the noblewoman the King was courting, who makes it clear to him that she think he is acting very badly and she isn't going to marry him as long as he continues to do so, who helps save the situation at one point by a risky and heroic act (riding out of the king's army to one commanded in part by her father, just before the battle starts, to prevent the latter from being tricked into fighting the former), marries the king after he has reversed his policy, gets captured by the Empire when the castle she is in falls, and escapes by a piece of elegant cleverness of the same order as what my protagonist has been using to beat the empire in his campaigns.
In Salamander, the original plot involved a conflict between a good/bad mage (well intentioned but naive), a bad/bad mage (manipulating the good/bad one), and a good mage—very powerful, generally believed to be long dead. It ended with a confrontation between the good mage and the good/bad mage, won by the former.
By the time the book was written, the good mage had become a secondary character, his daughter had shown up as a student at the college where the other two mages teach, and she and the good/bad mage had become the protagonists. The good/bad mage sees the error of his ways fairly early on (the bad/bad mage having died due to an unexpected glitch in the magical procedure being developed by the good/bad mage) and joins forces with father and daughter. The remaining conflicts are between the three of them and other people who want to use the good/bad mage's invention for their own purposes, good and bad.
I had also discovered two different romances developing, one between two intellectuals (good/bad mage and daughter) and one between two highly intelligent practical people (daughter's best friend and heir to the kingdom who is courting her and trying to get control over the mage's invention for well meaning but not necessarily correct reasons). A very different plot, but one I was happy with.
And the book had developed a secondary political theme: In what sense ends justify means. The Prince is basically a good guy willing to do bad things, including killing innocent people, for sufficiently important purposes. And prepared to say so.
"If you could get a message to her, asking her to come here and assuring her of safety, would she believe you?"
"Perhaps. Would it be true?"
Another long silence, again ended by the Prince. "No. She sounds an admirable person, and one who might in time prove useful to the Kingdom; I would prefer to do her no harm. But I have obligations to my brother and to the kingdom he rules. If it turns out that the only way of keeping our enemies from learning magery that could be our ruin is to kill a charming young lady, or two, or three, I will do it. "
Mari smiled. "And you say so even though I have no truthteller to tell me if you lie. I am not sure your Highness is fit for politics."
"I do not think you need a truthteller, lady. And under the circumstances, lying to you might be unwise."
(the "circumstances" are that he is a widower, Mari's father is a very high ranking noble, and both suspect that her father plans to marry her to him—a prospect not unattractive to either of them. She's both beautiful and smart. And the best friend of Ellen, the daughter, who is the person they are talking about.)
Do readers find this sort of thing interesting? It's not very close to what I usually post on—but then, part of the idea of this blog is as a place where I can talk about whatever I feel like.
June 17, 2011
Murray Rothbard on Me and Vice Versa
A correspondent points me at an old piece by Murray Rothbard criticizing me for my failure to hate the state, and asks for comment.
Rothbard's basic point is correct. I do not regard support for government as an act of willful evil but as an intellectual mistake; my arguments (and his) could be wrong, and some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among available human institutions. And even if we are correct, it is not unreasonable for other people to think we are not, as lots of intelligent people I know do.
The flip side of that is that I think one consequence of his attitude was to make him willing to be deliberately dishonest in his arguments—all being fair in war. That included being dishonest in the arguments he made to fellow libertarians.
My standard example was an exchange long ago, after a talk of his in which he claimed that Reagan did not really cut government and offered as evidence the increase in the nominal federal budget. I pointed out that, while his conclusion might for all I knew be true, his evidence combined whatever growth had occurred in the real size of the federal government with the effect of inflation over the period.
His response was that that was all right; because Reagan was responsible for the inflation, it was appropriate to use it to make his performance look worse. Think that through and he was saying that it was all right to misrepresent the evidence to his fellow libertarians as long as the result was to make them think badly of someone they should think badly of, to lead them to the correct conclusion for the wrong reason. I don't regard that as a desirable approach to political (or other discussion). Or, for that matter, a libertarian one—we are generally opposed to fraud as well as force.
I've written at some length online in the past on what I consider Rothbard's dishonesty with regard to economic history, in particular his misrepresentation of Smith (unfavorable) and his French contemporaries (favorable); see this old post for examples and further links. And there have been other examples. Murray was bright, articulate, and could be charming, but I don't think he could be trusted.
Rothbard's basic point is correct. I do not regard support for government as an act of willful evil but as an intellectual mistake; my arguments (and his) could be wrong, and some sort of government might be the least bad alternative among available human institutions. And even if we are correct, it is not unreasonable for other people to think we are not, as lots of intelligent people I know do.
The flip side of that is that I think one consequence of his attitude was to make him willing to be deliberately dishonest in his arguments—all being fair in war. That included being dishonest in the arguments he made to fellow libertarians.
My standard example was an exchange long ago, after a talk of his in which he claimed that Reagan did not really cut government and offered as evidence the increase in the nominal federal budget. I pointed out that, while his conclusion might for all I knew be true, his evidence combined whatever growth had occurred in the real size of the federal government with the effect of inflation over the period.
His response was that that was all right; because Reagan was responsible for the inflation, it was appropriate to use it to make his performance look worse. Think that through and he was saying that it was all right to misrepresent the evidence to his fellow libertarians as long as the result was to make them think badly of someone they should think badly of, to lead them to the correct conclusion for the wrong reason. I don't regard that as a desirable approach to political (or other discussion). Or, for that matter, a libertarian one—we are generally opposed to fraud as well as force.
I've written at some length online in the past on what I consider Rothbard's dishonesty with regard to economic history, in particular his misrepresentation of Smith (unfavorable) and his French contemporaries (favorable); see this old post for examples and further links. And there have been other examples. Murray was bright, articulate, and could be charming, but I don't think he could be trusted.
June 16, 2011
Estimating Blog Traffic
In my previous post I raised the question of how many people read this blog. Blogger gives statistics on pageviews, showing about a thousand a day. But I have no idea either how many additional views I am getting via Shrook or its equivalents or how many of the views I am getting are by robots rather than eyeballs—web spiders or something similar. I gather that statistics on web pages are generally overstated because of such.
Does anyone reading this know either how I can calculate such things or whether there are sites that maintain the relevant statistics?
Part of my curiosity is personal, part has to do with wondering to what degree the internet is replacing print publication. How does the number of readers I can expect for a post here compare to the number of people who read an article in a relatively small circulation print magazine, such as Liberty, for which I used to write? I have not found any precise figures for its circulation, but my guess is between two and eight thousand. If I assume that any single article was read by half that number, the total is probably comparable to, might even be less than, the average number of readers of one of my posts here.
And, of course, the question is also relevant to the usefulness of blogs as marketing tools, in my case for my self-published books.
Does anyone reading this know either how I can calculate such things or whether there are sites that maintain the relevant statistics?
Part of my curiosity is personal, part has to do with wondering to what degree the internet is replacing print publication. How does the number of readers I can expect for a post here compare to the number of people who read an article in a relatively small circulation print magazine, such as Liberty, for which I used to write? I have not found any precise figures for its circulation, but my guess is between two and eight thousand. If I assume that any single article was read by half that number, the total is probably comparable to, might even be less than, the average number of readers of one of my posts here.
And, of course, the question is also relevant to the usefulness of blogs as marketing tools, in my case for my self-published books.
How to Milk an Almond, ... is now available
As I mentioned recently, I've been engaged in several self-publishing projects lately. One of them is now complete.
How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes is now available from CreateSpace, Amazon.com's POD subsidiary; the URL for buying it is:
https://www.createspace.com/3565795
The book is about 160 pages (8"x10"), costs $9, contains about 330 recipes. Each is given in the original form (or translation if the original is not in English), along with a description of how we do it—quantities and, in most cases, instructions. These are necessary because period recipes tend to leave out irrelevant details such as quantities, temperatures, and times.
Most of the recipes are from the 13th through 15th centuries. The earliest are extracted from a letter written in the sixth century by a Byzantine physician to Theoderick, king of the Franks, and the latest from The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened, published (posthumously) in 1669. There is also one modern recipe for a medieval middle eastern drink (sekanjabin) accompanied by two somewhat fragmentary 13th c. recipes. In addition to recipes there are articles on what food ingredients were available when, how to do medieval cooking, sources of recipes, and a variety of related matters.
For those who like to see before they buy, the entire book is available as a free pdf.
For readers who might consider their own self-publishing projects, the basics of doing it with CreateSpace are:
You create and send them a pdf of the book cover and a pdf of the book itself; Word is adequate for the latter purpose, although a page layout program might be better. Open Office (free, open source) includes a graphics module that you can do your cover with. CreateSpace prints and sends you a proof copy, charging a few dollars for the copy plus postage. You go through the proof copy, find lots of mistakes that you somehow missed before, fix them, send in a new pdf, get back another proof copy. Repeat until your rate of new errors gets acceptably low—it is amazing how many errors can survive repeated proofing—or you run out of time or patience. You then tell them that the latest version is acceptable, they put it up for sale on their web page and (if you wish) on Amazon, and also (if you wish) make it available for ordinary bookstores to buy and resell.
You set the price; the higher the price you set, the higher your royalty. The royalty also depends on where it is sold—highest via CreateSpace itself, somewhat lower through Amazon, still lower if it goes to a brick and mortar store.
I set the price for our book to give a royalty of about a dollar a copy at the lowest rate. If I had been willing to sell it only through CreateSpace at a royalty rate just above zero—a sensible policy if the only reason you are self-publishing a book is to get it out there, not as a source of revenue—I could have priced it at $4 and still collected a few cents of revenue for each copy sold. That assumes that I pay (as I did) an extra $39 once plus $5/year to get the Pro plan, which has a more favorable royalty rate than the standard (free) plan.
All of which gets us back to a question I have discussed here before: Whether the current publishing model is going to survive the competition from both online POD and eBooks. I checked the Amazon price for a reasonably successful recent fantasy paperback and used the CreateSpace royalty calculator to find the royalty (via the eStore) at the same price; it looks as though it is comparable to what an author would expect to get from a commercial publisher. The publisher has the advantage of providing an advance and some marketing effort. On the other hand, especially for an author not yet established, getting published is hard—it took me some three years to get an acceptance for my first novel.
Some of you may be curious as to how my second novel, up on Amazon as a Kindle, is doing. So am I. The only feedback I get consists of reviews—three so far, all very favorable—and the Amazon rating, which shows how a given book rates in recent sales relative to all books sold by Amazon (or, in this case, all kindle files); high numbers are bad. One of the perils of publishing, whether self-publishing or commercial publishing, is becoming addicted to frequent checks of one's Amazon rating.
Salamander's was running at well over 100,000 initially, which is not very impressive—or surprising. After I put up a post here, enough copies sold to get it to something like 20-30,000. It then gradually drifted back up. It dropped again, possibly as a result of my son Patri mentioning it on his blog. It again drifted back up. A few days ago it again dropped. I have not figured out why, although my younger son suggests that it may be due to his efforts inserting references to it on TV Tropes, one of his main sources of literary self-education. It is now drifting up again.
Current promotion plans mostly consist of attending a couple of sf conventions where, with luck, I will be on panels, perhaps be able to do a reading from the book. Ideally, the various sources of attention will eventually get me enough readers and reviews to maintain sales via word of mouth. Maybe.
All of which got me curious as to how big an audience my blog has. Over a period of about a week—during which I was more active than usual, due to the flap over Palin's comment on Paul Revere—the log showed about a thousand readers a day. For the entire period it has been up, the average is more like five hundred, but my guess is that it has trended up over time. And those figures, as I understand them, don't show people who read a blog indirectly via an RSS reader such as Shrook, the one I use.
Which suggests that a not-terribly well known blog may still provide a signficant platform for pushing self-published books, especially ones likely to be of interest to its readers.
Speaking of which I should probably mention that although neither of my novels is about either economics or libertarianism in any strong sense, both have connections to those as well as to my historical interests. Salamander, in particular, started with the idea of a fantasy equivalent of the central planning fallacy, the persuasive idea that if only some sensible person had control over all the resources out there, wonderful things could be done. In its fictional world magery is weak, which is frustrating to mages—one of whom has worked out a way of solving the problem by funneling the power of a very large number of mages through one mage. He is well intentioned and naive, and the two problems with that project have not yet occurred to him.
And I had a good deal of fun in Harald with the economics of warfare, including the problem of raising and running an army without either tax revenue or feudal obligations.
Would readers be interested in a more extensive discussion of novel writing, from the standpoint of a relatively new novelist?
How to Milk an Almond, Stuff an Egg, and Armor a Turnip: A Thousand Years of Recipes is now available from CreateSpace, Amazon.com's POD subsidiary; the URL for buying it is:
https://www.createspace.com/3565795
The book is about 160 pages (8"x10"), costs $9, contains about 330 recipes. Each is given in the original form (or translation if the original is not in English), along with a description of how we do it—quantities and, in most cases, instructions. These are necessary because period recipes tend to leave out irrelevant details such as quantities, temperatures, and times.
Most of the recipes are from the 13th through 15th centuries. The earliest are extracted from a letter written in the sixth century by a Byzantine physician to Theoderick, king of the Franks, and the latest from The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Opened, published (posthumously) in 1669. There is also one modern recipe for a medieval middle eastern drink (sekanjabin) accompanied by two somewhat fragmentary 13th c. recipes. In addition to recipes there are articles on what food ingredients were available when, how to do medieval cooking, sources of recipes, and a variety of related matters.
For those who like to see before they buy, the entire book is available as a free pdf.
For readers who might consider their own self-publishing projects, the basics of doing it with CreateSpace are:
You create and send them a pdf of the book cover and a pdf of the book itself; Word is adequate for the latter purpose, although a page layout program might be better. Open Office (free, open source) includes a graphics module that you can do your cover with. CreateSpace prints and sends you a proof copy, charging a few dollars for the copy plus postage. You go through the proof copy, find lots of mistakes that you somehow missed before, fix them, send in a new pdf, get back another proof copy. Repeat until your rate of new errors gets acceptably low—it is amazing how many errors can survive repeated proofing—or you run out of time or patience. You then tell them that the latest version is acceptable, they put it up for sale on their web page and (if you wish) on Amazon, and also (if you wish) make it available for ordinary bookstores to buy and resell.
You set the price; the higher the price you set, the higher your royalty. The royalty also depends on where it is sold—highest via CreateSpace itself, somewhat lower through Amazon, still lower if it goes to a brick and mortar store.
I set the price for our book to give a royalty of about a dollar a copy at the lowest rate. If I had been willing to sell it only through CreateSpace at a royalty rate just above zero—a sensible policy if the only reason you are self-publishing a book is to get it out there, not as a source of revenue—I could have priced it at $4 and still collected a few cents of revenue for each copy sold. That assumes that I pay (as I did) an extra $39 once plus $5/year to get the Pro plan, which has a more favorable royalty rate than the standard (free) plan.
All of which gets us back to a question I have discussed here before: Whether the current publishing model is going to survive the competition from both online POD and eBooks. I checked the Amazon price for a reasonably successful recent fantasy paperback and used the CreateSpace royalty calculator to find the royalty (via the eStore) at the same price; it looks as though it is comparable to what an author would expect to get from a commercial publisher. The publisher has the advantage of providing an advance and some marketing effort. On the other hand, especially for an author not yet established, getting published is hard—it took me some three years to get an acceptance for my first novel.
Some of you may be curious as to how my second novel, up on Amazon as a Kindle, is doing. So am I. The only feedback I get consists of reviews—three so far, all very favorable—and the Amazon rating, which shows how a given book rates in recent sales relative to all books sold by Amazon (or, in this case, all kindle files); high numbers are bad. One of the perils of publishing, whether self-publishing or commercial publishing, is becoming addicted to frequent checks of one's Amazon rating.
Salamander's was running at well over 100,000 initially, which is not very impressive—or surprising. After I put up a post here, enough copies sold to get it to something like 20-30,000. It then gradually drifted back up. It dropped again, possibly as a result of my son Patri mentioning it on his blog. It again drifted back up. A few days ago it again dropped. I have not figured out why, although my younger son suggests that it may be due to his efforts inserting references to it on TV Tropes, one of his main sources of literary self-education. It is now drifting up again.
Current promotion plans mostly consist of attending a couple of sf conventions where, with luck, I will be on panels, perhaps be able to do a reading from the book. Ideally, the various sources of attention will eventually get me enough readers and reviews to maintain sales via word of mouth. Maybe.
All of which got me curious as to how big an audience my blog has. Over a period of about a week—during which I was more active than usual, due to the flap over Palin's comment on Paul Revere—the log showed about a thousand readers a day. For the entire period it has been up, the average is more like five hundred, but my guess is that it has trended up over time. And those figures, as I understand them, don't show people who read a blog indirectly via an RSS reader such as Shrook, the one I use.
Which suggests that a not-terribly well known blog may still provide a signficant platform for pushing self-published books, especially ones likely to be of interest to its readers.
Speaking of which I should probably mention that although neither of my novels is about either economics or libertarianism in any strong sense, both have connections to those as well as to my historical interests. Salamander, in particular, started with the idea of a fantasy equivalent of the central planning fallacy, the persuasive idea that if only some sensible person had control over all the resources out there, wonderful things could be done. In its fictional world magery is weak, which is frustrating to mages—one of whom has worked out a way of solving the problem by funneling the power of a very large number of mages through one mage. He is well intentioned and naive, and the two problems with that project have not yet occurred to him.
And I had a good deal of fun in Harald with the economics of warfare, including the problem of raising and running an army without either tax revenue or feudal obligations.
Would readers be interested in a more extensive discussion of novel writing, from the standpoint of a relatively new novelist?
June 5, 2011
Argument Against Interest: The Left and Palin
One thing that strikes me about the latest round of Palin bashing is that her critics on the left appear to be acting against their own self-interest. I expect almost all of them would rather see Obama re-elected than defeated by a Republican. I expect most of them believe, as I do, that Palin would be one of the easiest of the potential Republican nominees for Obama to defeat. If so, one would expect them to go as easy as possible on her until it is clear who the Republican nominee is going to be, and only go back to making fun of her when it is clear that doing so won't reduce her chances of being nominated. That does not seem to be what they are doing.
One possible explanation is that her critics on the left think their attacks will make Republicans more willing to nominate her. An alternative I find more plausible is that what we are observing is the usual problem of producing a public good. The left winger who refrains from attacking Palin, given a halfway plausible opportunity to do so, is giving up a private benefit—the fun and kudos of mocking the big bad witch. He is producing a public good—the public in question being all of the people who want to see her nominated and defeated. Public goods, for familiar reasons, are under-produced.
The argument does not apply to critics on the other side, Republicans who want Obama defeated, think Palin is unlikely to beat him, and would therefor prefer a different nominee. Their attacks on Palin make perfectly good sense in terms of their political objectives.
One possible explanation is that her critics on the left think their attacks will make Republicans more willing to nominate her. An alternative I find more plausible is that what we are observing is the usual problem of producing a public good. The left winger who refrains from attacking Palin, given a halfway plausible opportunity to do so, is giving up a private benefit—the fun and kudos of mocking the big bad witch. He is producing a public good—the public in question being all of the people who want to see her nominated and defeated. Public goods, for familiar reasons, are under-produced.
The argument does not apply to critics on the other side, Republicans who want Obama defeated, think Palin is unlikely to beat him, and would therefor prefer a different nominee. Their attacks on Palin make perfectly good sense in terms of their political objectives.
David D. Friedman's Blog
- David D. Friedman's profile
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David D. Friedman isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
