Brad DeLong is an economist who writes on economic history, growth, and policy, plus book notes and commentary.
HN commenters recommend him as a witty, readable economist, citing Krugman's endorsement, though one notes a source with a questionable quote.
Context has something to do with it, though the title's a poor one regardless IMO.
On your own blog, to readers familiar with your topics and post history, "how the fuck did we get here" might be an acceptable / excusable title, though even there, I'd argue that it's a rather poor pick. It's a bit like dropping a URL or video link with the comment "lol" on an HN or Metaverse thread, say. There's not much to go on.
Even pretty good bloggers often have ... depressingly unilluminating titles. Brad DeLong, for example, leans very heavily on "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps" (you'll find a few examples perusing <https://braddelong.substack.com/archive?sort=new>). Several people on the Fediverse post frequent themed items, with a repetitive title leading the description, e.g., "Plucked from the archives <description>". My suggestion is to invert that order, have the description first, and probably hashtag the topic as, say, #FromTheArchives.
(I do something similar with "#OccasionalEtymology" and "#DredsDictionary", see:
- <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/OccasionalEtymology>
- <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/DredsDictionary>
There's a reason why article authoring and headline writing are often distinct roles at traditional serial publications. What it takes to write copy and to sell it (via the headline) really are separate skills.
Nielsen's microcontent guidelines: "Microcontent: A Few Small Words Have a Mega Impact on Business"…
Not GP, but two blogs I like are https://noahpinion.substack.com and https://braddelong.substack.com
Both authors are quite witty, so their blogs are eminently readable. They're also trained in economics (have PhDs in economics) and are econ professors, so I put a lot more stock in the stuff they write (useful heuristic, but some may disagree) than in lynalden's posts.
Economics is harder to separate from politics compared to other sciences, so it's especially useful to read multiple points of view and understand what the biases of authors lie/what the ongoing debates are. One thing I dislike about lynalden is her tendency to present as the one "true" economics Milton Friedman's monetarist theory of inflation, and doing so without explicitly calling out the hidden assumptions being made along the way or considering other theories of economics (e.g. Keynesian). OTOH, Noah and Brad can be categorized as Keynesian economists, so they present a more left-leaning view of the field of economics where the quantity theory of money is not accepted whole cloth.
I leave it to others to judge the validity, but I found Brad DeLong's epithet for Thiel amusing (https://braddelong.substack.com/p/saturday-night-thoughts-on-the-need):
> Even so, SVB knew it had gotten itself into trouble—that it had put too large a share of its assets into long-term Treasuries that it intended to hold-to-maturity, and that while it was notionally hedged against interest-rate duration risk by this hold-to-maturity strategy, that strategy put those assets outside the circle of those available to meet unexpected withdrawals, and so caused liquidity problems. SVB was, I am told by sources who really should know, because they talked to people talking to people doing the deal, that SVB came within twenty minutes of getting enough additional cash to fix likely problems.
> Then chaos monkey Peter Thiel showed up: advising companies to pull their money out of SVB.
Amazingly, that's a real quote from the book[1] (according to that source David Graeber blames bad editing), and it does raise questions about the credibility of anything else in that book.
But that story about Haiti's debt can be found in better sources.
1: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/on-april-fools-day-we-remember-david
I took Krugman's advice to read DeLong at one point and don't regret it, though he's not on my regular rotation:
https://braddelong.substack.com
Url changed from https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-cyrus-cylinder, which points to this.