Walter Block is a professor of economics at Loyola University in New Orleans. He has been an active participant in the libertarian movement for over 40 years.
Within the libertarian camp, he is by far the most prolific in academic journals. Nobody else comes close. He has published something in the range of 450 journal articles. He just will not stop. They keep coming out of his word processor like an assembly line.
I publish a lot of stuff, but it is not peer-reviewed. I do not have to convince an editor that what I have to say is important. The editor does not have to convince several screening readers that it is important. All I have to persuade is my subscribers. My subscribers tend not to care one way or the other whether I insert a lot of footnotes. They probably would prefer that I do not.
Professor Block is a master of footnotes. He has offered more of them than any other libertarian economist.
He now has a problem. The larger a man's legacy, the more unwieldy it is. Who can receive it and extend it? No one person. This is a task for a team -- an uncoordinated team. How can anyone who is capable of extending part of it, discover that part? This is a very large haystack with many needles.
What if the legacy is a large pile of bricks? Can they be used to construct many buildings in an undesigned community? Or is there chaos in the brickyard?
This is the problem of inheritance. Everyone who leaves a legacy faces this problem. The larger the legacy, the greater the problem.
What can a person do to give guidance to the potential heirs, whoever they may be?
Prof. Walter Block
Economics Department
Loyola University
New Orleans, LA
Dear Walter:
I have been thinking about your situation. About 40 years ago, George Stigler wrote the following (approximately):
There are two groups of economists: those who write, and those who do not write. Over time, members of each group become more efficient in their specialization.
You are clearly a member of the first group.
There is an old saying: "You write faster than I can read." It surely applies to you. You write so much, and in so many different journals, and on so many different topics, that nobody could follow you if he wanted to, and academic specialization being what it is, nobody is going to try.
Another question comes to mind: "Where do I start?" For that, there is no known answer with respect to your writings.
Then there is this question: "Even if I start, will I live long enough to finish?" The answer to this question depends on how young the person is who asks it, how fast he reads, and how soon you are going to die. In general, however, the answer is "no."
You are now facing the problem of marginal utility. We know that as people consume more of a particular product, the next unit is lower on his scale of values. We are talking about getting people through 450 articles. A reader would have to have access to your wisdom very high on his scale of values. Other things, such as eating, sleeping, and earning a living, would have to be placed pretty far down on the scale.
Then there is the other economic law: the law of decreasing returns. It is really an extension of the law of marginal utility. It says that, as output increases, there is a decreasing rate of return to factor inputs.
Factor inputs in your case are these: new ideas, outlets for these new ideas, and life expectancy.
There are lots of new outlets for your ideas, digital publishing being what it is, and academic journal multiplication being what it is, but the other two are a problem. Once somebody hits 76, the likelihood of a new idea occurring to him is remote, and the likelihood that he will adopt it borders on the infinitesimal. If it is really an important new idea, he will have to rethink everything he has written. That, in your case, would be the irresistible force, which at some point would have a collision with the immovable object, namely, the one thing that ends academic tenure these days: death.
Innovative and revolutionary thinkers must depend on disciples to extend their ideas through time and into a broader market. In the field of economics, there are a handful of innovators who do attract disciples. The followers of Keynes are called Keynesians. The followers of Ludwig von Mises are called Misesians. The followers of Hayek are called Hayekians. The followers of Rothbard are called Rothbardians. The followers of Friedman are called Friedmanites.
You obviously have a major marketing problem. I do not think your followers are going to be called Blockians -- certainly not by your critics. Critics will think of something more appropriate.
So, your disciples and followers need a little help from you to make their work easier. It is now time for you to sit down, think about all that you have written, review all that you have written, and put it together in about a 250-page book. Get your basic ideas down, and stick in footnotes and digital links to the articles.
Recently, we spoke about the supreme master of journal articles in the field of economics: Harry Johnson. He died at age 53, and he left behind a total of 526 peer-reviewed journal articles, 41 books, and 150 book reviews. On the day he died, there were 19 articles that had been accepted for publication by various journals. I do not think it is likely that anybody is ever going to equal that performance. In terms of playing by the academic rules, nobody in the field of economics has come close to Johnson, especially in the limited number of years that he had.
You are catching up. The question is this: do you want to end up like Harry Johnson?
If you ask an economics major today if he has ever heard of Harry Johnson, the answer will be no. Even if you ask a graduate student in economics, the answer will still be no. There is no Johnson thesis or Johnson hypothesis. There is no Johnson movement. He was not closely associated with any particular school of economic thought. For all of his work, it is as if he had been an obscure professor in an obscure college, not the major Canadian economist of the 20th century, and not a professor at the University of Chicago. He was always in the shadow of Friedman, Stigler, and the other Chicago school economists. Yet in terms of output, none of them could hold a candle to him.
Basically, it boils down to this: either you put together the book leading people through the comprehensive thought of Walter Block, or else it is likely that nobody is going to do it. If you had written less, somebody might attempt it. Today, only a doctoral candidate would attempt it.
You would make a tremendous doctoral dissertation topic for somebody who reads very fast, and who does not want to be caught up short by some senior professor who has also read your work, and who might find errors of omission in the dissertation. You are the ideal doctoral dissertation topic: lots of material that nobody has looked at, yet not so influential that anybody on the dissertation committee will care enough to object to the dissertation's thesis, if any. But you are influential enough to justify the dissertation. "I've heard of him. He was the guy who wanted to legalize blackmail."
I am therefore calling you to an almost superhuman task: reread what you have written. All of it. Then try to make sense of it.
Maybe the best way to begin would be to create a WordPress.com website that is divided into categories that you have written about, with links to all of the articles in each category, chronologically listed, in a particular category. For articles that are not online, just give the bibliographical citation.
This takes advantage of the division of labor. Somebody is interested in a topic, and he is willing to read what you have said about it because of his interest in the topic. He is probably not going to read about it just because you are the one who wrote about it. A disciple might do this. But disciples are lazy, just like everybody else, and they suffer from declining marginal returns. They probably are not going to read through all of it. They need a guide. How about this title? Block's Pile.
If I ever write your biography, which I will not, because I would have to read everything you have written, and I am 72 years old, I know what I will call it: Reader's Block.
Maybe somebody else will write that book. Try to make it easier for him. Get up that category-based website. Write a guide to your writings.
Will one more article change the world? Unlikely. Unless . . . you come up with the Block thesis.
Warning: if you have not come up with it yet, the odds are pretty high that you are not going to come up with it.
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