No Jibbering to Economic Reality Check
New Name, Same Content
When I first started this Substack, I thought I’d be using it to write longer form essays, analyses, and a whole bunch of other things that wouldn’t fit into the more “traditional” outlets. And to be fair, I did do something akin to that. Once. And I liked writing that post a lot, actually, and I want to do more of it.
I thought I needed a title that was clever and directly tied into the works of one of my favorite economists, James Buchanan. I settled on “No Jibbering” as a name as an homage to probably my favorite passage from Buchanan, found in his essay, “Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors” ( vol. 17 of his collected works):
As a ‘social’ scientist, the primary function of the economist is to explain the workings of [the institutions of exchange] and to predict the effects of changes in their structure… The economist is able to do this because he possesses this central principle — an underlying theory of human behavior. And because he does so, he qualifies as a scientist and his discipline as a science. What a science does, or should do, is simply to allow the average man, through professional specialization, to command the heights of genius. The basic tools are the same principles, and these are chained forever to the properly disciplined professional. Without them, he is as a jibbering idiot, who makes only noise under an illusion of speech (emphasis added).
I like this quote because it so beautifully sums up Buchanan as a person and how he approached economics. For him, the (curious) task of economists was to look out the window and learn about what was going on in the real world among real people engaged in real life. He never sought to justify or defend, well, hardly anything. Instead, he wanted to understand and explain. And to him, economics was simply the most powerful tool to do so.
Above all else, I want to avoid being a “jibbering idiot!” And I like to think I’ve lived up to that, at least so far. When it came to naming the Substack, then, the choice was clear: No Jibbering.
But this name doesn’t really reflect what I’ve actually done with this space in the 70-some-odd posts since then. What I like to think I’ve done is provided a reality check to popular fallacies that have come out in the last 18 months.
I also heard more than once from people I trust that I needed a more SEO friendly title if I wanted to be “discovered.” After all, not many people are going to click on something called “no jibbering” and read it, so there is a bit of self-serving intentionality here as well.
Hence, the name change. I’ll fully admit, Claude.ai was used pretty heavily in coming up with the name and the one-sentence description. Some of the suggestions that Claude came up with were pretty funny, but “_____ Reality Check” was a consistent entry. So I settled on “Economics Reality Check” as the name.
I did try to make a new image for the thumbnail using AI but it kept spitting out ridiculous images of some old white guy looking at charts and figures printed out on papers scattered about his desk. I’m only 38, so that’s CLEARLY not me. I gave up after a few attempted prompts and dug out a picture of one of my tattoos:
The best thing about this tattoo is that it’s from a drawing that the one and only Walter E. Williams did for me after I passed my microeconomics preliminary exam. There’s a whole story about it that I could tell, but this has gone on long enough. Suffice it to say, I love that he drew this for me and I love that I have it permanently on my arm. It’s been a great ice breaker, it’s diffused a lot of tension, and I’ve only met a handful of people who didn’t love it when they saw it (which is itself another story!). It even got featured in the Troy University student newspaper!
Anyway, that’s enough for one post that’s meant to just be, “hey, if you’re used to seeing ‘No Jibbering’ in your inbox, now you’re going to see “Economic Reality Check” instead. Everything else is the same.