Sunk Costs and Substack
When I was tooling up for Bet On It, I opted for WordPress over Substack in order to have greater design flexibility. After a month on WordPress, I am happy to admit that I made a mistake.
If it was a small mistake, I would just stick to my initial path. But I’m now convinced that it was a big mistake. Everyone says Substack is much less buggy, and the positive network externalities look serious.
Upshot: I’m ignoring sunk costs and switching to Substack. Starting Monday, April 4, expect all new Bet On It content to appear on betonit.substack.com. All past Bet On It content will be moved over as well. And if you already subscribed to Bet On It, your subscription should be automatically carried over. (Though you may want to check because the WordPress version had some issues with subscriptions).
Sorry for the small disruption, and I look forward to seeing readers on Substack from here on out!
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies - New Edition, – Illustrated (2008)
The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.
TRANSCRIPT: The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan is worth the read. In case anyone is wondering why we link to Google Books versus Amazon, it's not because we receive monetary compensation for one versus the other. We, at planksip, support Google Books over Amazon simply because our Journalists use a shared copy for commenting. Of course, we have to purchase individual copies for each contributor on any given project or story, but the ability to create a shared Google Doc directly linked to the book, research or citations is extremely valuable.
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If your writer's voice is fiercely independent and embodied as the protagonist for the truth, if you feel like you have something to offer planksip and want to be a contracted, employed or official contributor then let's chat.