Update to “About Blog” (Posted June 23, 2025)
On October 16, 2024 I announced some changes in my artdiamondblog.com web log. For instance, I was going to focus more entries on my next book project: Less Costs, More Cures: Unbinding Medical Entrepreneurs, and I was to include some brief entries on my memories of important economists such as George Stigler and Gary Becker. I implemented both changes, though more of the former than the latter.
One other change that I have made, especially in the last few months, is to precede almost all entries with (sometimes detailed) introductory commentary.
I believe that these changes have improved the average quality of my entries, but may have narrowed the audience who will find them of interest. My blog entries in the last several months may be of increased interest to those who are willing to follow me into the weeds of healthcare policy, but may be of decreased interest to those who care more about the broader set of issues that I dealt with in my Openness to Creative Destruction book.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about the changes to my blog. On the one hand I feel some pride and satisfaction on the higher quality of entries, and have some hope that many of the entries will end up being useful early notes toward my bigger project. On the other hand, the changes have not reduced the overall time I invest in the blog, as I had hoped they would.
The bottom line is that I have been spending too much time on the blog, and too little time on my writing and research projects. Or as an economist might say, the opportunity cost of marginal time spent on the blog is too high. So I have decided to implement another change. Starting on July 15, 2025, I will commit to running a new entry on Monday of each week, but will not post on the other days of the week unless something big comes up. (An entry is usually not created on the day it is set to automatically post. For efficiency, I often create several entries in advance at one sitting.)
I want to see how this change works–it may be permanent, or after the end of the summer, I may switch back to daily posts.
I make this change with some twinge of sadness and regret, since I take some pride in having run a daily post on almost all days from July 15, 2005 through July 15, 2025.
On July 15 of every year Aaron Brown sends me happy blog birthday greetings. (I continue to be grateful to Aaron for his thoughtful comments on blog entries, and for letting me know when an entry is missing or when something in an entry is amiss.)
This year on July 15 my blog will be 20 years old.
Perseverance is sometimes praiseworthy; pivoting is sometimes praiseworthy too. I hope I am right to pivot.
Original “About Blog” (Posted April 20, 2019)
My blog, artdiamondblog.com, was intended to be a digital public version of a “commonplace book” of the sort that was found useful by enlightenment figures such as John Milton and John Locke. A commonplace book is a combination of a notebook and a scrapbook, where you record eloquent quotes, funny jokes, inchoate musings, and anything else you do not want to lose or forget.
In my blog I often record evidence or arguments related to my book Openness to Creative Destruction. Many of the entries were the digital note cards that, after being re-arranged and edited, became the supporting material for the book. Many of the note cards did not directly enter the book, but still are relevant as supporting evidence or arguments.
From about April 11 – 19, 2019, the blog underwent a transition from the Movable Type platform to the WordPress platform. Legacy Movable Type entries, and especially entries during and shortly after the transition, have a somewhat different format than subsequent WordPress entries. I only know how to fix this on a one-by-one basis, and I do not have time to do that, so the inconsistency will persist.
There were short-term costs for me in learning the WordPress platform, but I think blog readers have seen more benefits than costs–in particular, the new version is more secure and more mobile-friendly.
My content and development “staff” on the blog consists of me. But for accomplishing the transition I am grateful to the good people at LivingDot Technical Support including Gabe, Rachel, Kenny, Leo, and Samuel. Aaron Brown has long been great at reading the blog every day, and letting me know about errors as soon as he sees them. (His reward for doing this is that we send his family a Christmas card once a year.)