Starting afresh

A couple of big ‘life changes’ this year: I’m close to finishing my Ph.D., and I’ve moved with my family to Aotearoa New Zealand.

The process of doing the Ph.D. has in a lot of ways been less useful than I’d hoped in terms of getting me up to speed on contemporary economics – it has, however, given me a decent grounding in some elements of institutional economics and political economy, which I hope to draw on in future work.

It’s also made me somewhat sceptical about elements of the enterprise of academic research – which enterprise has many strengths, but also important weaknesses. I’m keen in the next however-many-years to do some work, if I can, that isn’t too constrained by academic genre conventions. Hopefully that will involve more blogging.

I’ll be wanting to spend a lot of attention in the next however-many-years on the rather daunting task of trying to get to grips with a whole new country’s history and institutions.

But I also want to make some time, if I can, for elements of the existing intellectual project – and this post is I guess yet another effort to pin down the trajectory of that project.

For me, for now, I think the thing I most want to focus on – painting with a broad brush here, obviously – is the relationship between liberal and radical generative principles of political-economic institutions and institution-design. I feel like, on the one hand, I’ve got a huge amount of work to do – getting to grips with even the basics of both a new country and big areas of this intellectual space. On the other hand, though, I feel like I’m now middle-aged, and need to accept that in a range of areas my intellectual apprenticeship is, for better or worse, over. I’ll be trying to “make a start” rather than “prepare to make a start” over the next few months and years.