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About three years ago, someone asked me why, with my physics undergrad background and a PhD in economics, I had decided to become a professional blogger. I told him that blogging seemed like the highest-leverage thing I could do, in terms of actually having an impact on the world.
I didn’t mean that bloggers literally rule the world, of course — this isn’t Ender’s Game. Nor do I have any illusions that I’ll be able to have as much influence as a top politician like Donald Trump, a top entrepreneur like Elon Musk, and so on. But in terms of what I could personally accomplish, it seemed like a no-brainer — being an opinion writer has probably allowed me to change the world much more than being an academic or an engineer or a financier or a consultant would have.
Why? Because blogging has allowed me to inject ideas into the discourse with unparalleled speed, breadth, and access. A researcher goes deep into a few topics; a blogger can quickly hit the main points of many topics. This enables speed; academics might take months to write something useful about a breaking event like the Iran War or Trump’s tariffs, while I can have something out in hours. It also enables me to comment on a wide variety of topics, because people expect me to be an analyst rather than a subject-matter expert. And speed and breadth in turn allow me to talk to a wide variety of important and interesting people — top academics, billionaire company founders, presidential advisors.
Injecting ideas into the discourse is incredibly powerful. John Maynard Keynes famously described the power of idea injection:
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
To describe why idea injection is so powerful would take an entire post (which I do intend to write). There are a number of reasons. First, idea injection allows you to frame the terms of the debate. Whether people think your idea is right or wrong, once you put it out there, discussion of the issue at hand turns into discussion of whether your idea is good or bad.
As Keynes notes, an early writer’s ideas can also act as a kind of training data for later thinkers; it becomes a foundation off of which politicians, bureaucrats, staffers, other writers, and even entrepreneurs and financiers build when they make their own ideas.¹ Just today I saw Matt Yglesias and Jerusalem Demsas — two of my favorite pundits — riffing on my post on dating advice on their podcast.
But injecting ideas is only one part of a blogger’s influence. We’re also part of a community of intellectuals that span multiple disciplines and walks of life. On a daily basis I get to mull ideas over not just with other writers and pundits, but also with top academics, CEOs and entrepreneurs, Congressional staffers and political advisers, think-tankers, corporate researchers and engineers, and plenty of people from other countries. This leads to a much richer discussion, with a greater diversity of viewpoints, than almost anything else I can think of. And they reach a very wide set of ears. In a way, blogging is like DARPA — ad-hoc multidisciplinary teams that build the rapid prototype of an idea. OK, maybe that’s a bit pretentious, but you get the point.
Anyway, the reason I’m writing all of this is not to brag, but to complain. Over the last two years, I’ve felt like my job has become a bit less important than it used to be, for three reasons:
The rise of populism on all sides of the political spectrum in the U.S. means that smart ideas are simply not as likely to be implemented by the people in power.
The general shift to Substack and other monetizable direct-to-audience channels has made punditry less conversational.
The rapid proliferation of AI writing has increased the demands on readers’ attention (including my own).
This doesn’t mean I think punditry is dead or unimportant — despite the title of this post, I do think that what I write still matters — but it does mean I’m now spending some time thinking about how to regain some of the impact I felt I had a couple of years ago.
Populism means being intellectual is a liability
“Thus when the irreverent intellectual has done his work…The stage is now set for the fanatics.” — Eric Hoffer
Ten years ago, it was already apparent that wonkish policy types were to have a much diminished role under Donald Trump. Trump himself is not the type of person who’s inclined to listen to egghead intellectuals — he’ll always trust his own instincts, which were usually developed watching CNN in the early 1990s. In his first term, though, he could sometimes be prevailed upon to listen to reason when a crisis struck — Operation Warp Speed and the CARES Act were done under his auspices, because he stepped back and allowed smarter folks to take over.
And in Trump’s first term, it still felt like there were lots of relevant ideas for econ types to debate — trade policy, place-based economic policies, new socialist ideas from the Bernie camp, and so on. It felt like a time of great political ferment and upheaval — even if Trump himself wasn’t listening to economists, someone would be soon.
In Trump’s second administration, though, that’s all gone. Whether it was Covid, Trump’s advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head.
Take tariffs, for instance. Essentially no one thought — or thinks now — that his tariffs were a good idea. Oren Cass, one of the last few tariff defenders, has been reduced to speaking in snarky generalities about how “econ isn’t a science”, because on some level he knows that the way Trump went about imposing tariffs is intellectually indefensible.
There was Peter Navarro, of course, at least until he got sidelined. But Trump didn’t get the tariff idea from Navarro. He thought of it all himself, and then looked around for someone — anyone! — who would be willing to stand in front of a podium and endorse the policy, and Navarro was just the guy he found. Reading Peter Navarro’s books, or trying to start a dialogue with Navarro, would have been useless, because Navarro’s ideas — such as they are — weren’t actually driving anything. It was all just a cult of personality.
The rest of Trump’s administration is the same way. The “MAHA” antivax insanity, the research funding cuts, the doomed war in Iran, the reckless spending — it’s all just ad-hoc stuff that Trump did, either on a whim, or because the last guy he talked with told him it would be a good idea, or because he’s in damage control mode after a drop in the S&P. There’s no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There’s no one to argue with, because nothing that’s happening is based on an argument in the first place.
This state of affairs will eventually end, of course. Whoever succeeds Trump won’t have his cult of personality, and will have to rely on ideologies and ideas that will be ripe for debate. And if a Democrat retakes the White House in 2028, ideas will be back on the table, as they were during the Biden administration.
But even on the left, the trend is away from open intellectual debate. Zohran Mamdani and the other socialist candidates who are winning primary races in blue cities are interested in ideas, but only from people within their own clique. Leftism in America is fundamentally a factional movement disguised as an ideological one; bloggers who aren’t on the team will simply be ignored, except for the occasional denunciation.
This is just populism. Populism isn’t really about doing stuff that’s popular; it’s about putting factional and tribal conflict above the national interest or the general public good. The goal is always to “own” the other side, and economic and social outcomes become subordinate to that goal.
Intellectualism thrives in times of relative social peace. This isn’t one of those. Hopefully, the tide of populism is receding in America, but the experiences of other countries suggest that these times of factional struggle can go on for a very long time.
Monetization means intellectuals are siloed
“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.” — Ferenc Molnár
Substack has done a whole lot of good, both for me personally and (more importantly) for the world. In a time when most of the internet has been taken over by malignant opportunists and sensationalist attention-seekers, Substack stands as a lone island where reasoned, intelligent, earnest debate is still possible. It has also allowed many writers to escape from publications that