How Did I Get too Online? Þe Story
In þe end, it is þe responsibility of Paul Mende, Paul Krugman, & Jagdish Bhagwati
How did I get too online? What is the story of my journey to this particular virtual place in the noösphere?
The story:
Back in 1993, when Bill Clinton somewhat unexpectedly became president, I was one of the people who followed him to Washington. Coming down from Harvard where I was an associate professor of economics, I served not really as a policymaker but much more as a spear-carrier—those harried people you see running around carrying pieces of paper, trying to make sure that the right piece of paper is in front of the principal who has to speak or make decisions. It was glorious fun. The Clinton administration from 1993 to 1995 did many good things and made the country and the world a better place.
I left the Treasury in 1995. We had a change of Treasury Secretary from Lloyd Benson to Robert Rubin. Bentsen had been out of the Treasury building at 6 PM to attend cocktails and dinners, reinforcing his Washington social and political networks. Rubin—a truly brilliant and lovely man—had left his family behind in Manhattan, and could often be found still in his office working at 11pm, with his top and selected not-so-top aides around him. My wife and I then had a 5 and a 3 year-old. I wanted to stay married. So I came to the University of California at Berkeley.
It was at that point that Paul Mende, one of my college roommates, then a physics professor, introduced me to the internet, suggesting I should start a website. Scholarly communication was about to move online, he said. I should start putting my working papers, lecture notes, and such up on the World-Wide-Web, he said.
Flash forward three years. One evening I open my copy of the new issue of Foreign Affairs and find myself cited by both Paul Krugman and Jagdish Bhagwati—cited very favorably by Paul, and cited very unfavorably by Jagdish. But, as Captain Jack Sparrow says in the movie “Pirates of the Caribbean”: “You have heard of me”. Both of these people were far above my pay grade, and I was then desperate to be noticed by them and their ilk. Krugman was going to win a Nobel Prize in Economics, after all, and Bhagwati certainly ought to have won one.
They were citing me. But they were not citing anything I had written that had been printed. They were citing from my website. “Hmmm…” I thought.
And I have been too online since, to my great benefit and also detriment, but mostly benefit.
And I've been too Online a visitor since you've been too Online. Been a visitor since the good old days of the dinosaurs such as Mark Thoma, donating coffee money every now and then, often with tips on how to do it right. You, Thoma, Paul Krugman, Noah Smith and Nick Rowe and Co at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative -- yes, that still makes me chuckle -- were life savers, especially during the GFC. Will never forget those days. Double your subscriptions, people! We want Moar!
It's part of being a public intellectual nowadays. It used to be essays published in popular magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. Those magazines are mostly gone, so those essays wind up on one's blog.
I've been following since 2004, so I'll say thanks for all you have published. Whether it was by accident or design, you were ahead of the curve.