The all-time record for the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly economics articles was held by the late Harry Johnson, who died in 1977. He published 526 articles, in addition to 41 books and pamphlets. He died at age 53. I doubt that this record will ever be broken by somebody age 53.
My friend Walter Block, age 76, has now beaten Johnson's record: 528. He publishes something in the range of 25 articles a year. You can read about him on Wikipedia.
He now faces a major career decision. I have been reminding him of this for several years. His enormous legacy is scattered across academia. There are a lot of economics journals, most of them obscure, and he has at least one article in most of the obscure ones. The articles are not all online.
Every once in a while, like maybe every two days, he answers a letter submitted by one of his acolytes. They are published in Lew Rockwell.com's blog section. Following the tradition of fans of the Grateful Dead, who were known as Deadheads, these acolytes have become known as Blockheads. They are pretty sharp students. They want him to comment on this or that topic. He comments on each topic by listing at least a dozen articles that he has written on the topic. There is no way that anybody else could have found all of these articles.
A CLEARING HOUSE SITE
He needs to create a site that gives people access to all of these articles. He needs to get permission from all of the publishers to allow him to provide a PDF of his articles that were published in their specific journals. I think most publishers would grant this permission. It would increase traffic to their websites. It would be to their advantage to do this. Since they are in the field of economics, they understand economic advantage.
The site must have a search engine that lets people search for a term or phrase to pull up all the articles relating to this term or phrase. I have such a search engine on my website.
The website would be broken down into specific topics. There would have to be at least three dozen topics. I may be underestimating this. An individual would click a topic's link, and he would be taken to links to all of the articles related to this topic. There would be dozens of links for some of these topics.
Some energetic researcher could discover Dr. Block's opinions on any specific topic. There is no way that anybody is going to read all of his articles, other than an industrious graduate student who is writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Dr. Block's views. I would not recommend that anyone attempt this. First, he is too controversial. The graduate student will not get his dissertation through his dissertation committee unless he goes to considerable lengths to show why he doesn't agree with Dr. Block's opinions. Second, Dr. Block has written too much. That would be a tremendously difficult dissertation to write. It would be at least 50% footnotes.
When somebody is as productive as Dr. Block, he is tempted to continue to be productive in the same old way. He has developed good habits, and these good habits interfere with his legacy at age 76. He has to stop writing articles. Instead, he has to start thinking carefully about how to get them into one place, so that they will have long-term impact. His legacy is scattered. Nobody is going to be able to find all the pieces to this gigantic puzzle.
CHAOS IN THE BRICKYARD
In 1963, there was a tremendous letter to the editor that appeared in Science: "Chaos in the Brickyard." I recommend that every scholar read this essay early in his career. He probably should re-read it once every 10 years. You can read it here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/11253.cfm.
Unlike the journal articles mentioned in that letter to the editor, Dr. Block's are structured by means of a coherent worldview. They are scattered across numerous journals, but they are not scattered conceptually. This is why he needs a website that pulls them all together in one place.
When I say that he needs this, I really mean that the rest of us need this. He has no need of anything. He is a tenured professor, and he gets a very large salary, as he admitted in our public debate a few years ago. He is in academic fat city. He is not going to retire. He may even die in the way I that would like to die: face down on his keyboard with a long string of the same letter on the screen. If he times things right, this will be just after he has completed the article.
Somebody will have to take that final article and post it on a website. He won't have the opportunity to submit it to some journal. As long as someone will have to create such a website in order to post that final article, Dr. Block ought to put up some money now to put some of his hotshot graduate students to work on a joint project to consolidate his articles online. That would be a productive thing for his graduate students to do. They would actually learn how to do something useful: co-edit a website. Learning something useful is rare for graduate students.
I think the Mises Institute should set up individual websites for Austrian economists around the world. These would feed into the main website: Mises.org. They would be like spokes in a wheel. In a sense, they would be spokesmen in a wheel. These subsidiary sites would demonstrate how extensive Austrian school economics has become since 1982, when the Mises Institute was launched. I'm not sure how this can be done digitally, but I'm sure that it can be done.
The Mises Institute would get cooperation from Austrian economists who want to see their articles posted online. There must be a way to do this. Maybe it would just involve posting links to the digital publications in which the articles were published. Again, I think most editors would allow this sort of arrangement in order to increase traffic to their websites. The Mises Institute's site has a lot of traffic, and it certainly would be to the advantage of publishers of the obscure economics journals to gain access to such traffic.
I would donate some seed capital to jump-start this project. I think other fans of Dr. Block would do the same.
CONCLUSION
Dr. Block faces an enormous challenge. To oversee this consolidation project, he would have to re-read his articles. He also would have to write a summary of each article before he posts a link to the article. He would therefore have to read at least an article a day, and then write and post a summary. The summary would have to present the article's highlights in a readable form. This takes time. Meanwhile, he feels compelled to write an article every two weeks. Busy, busy, busy.
Anyone this productive at his age needs to consolidate his work. It is wasteful to have scattered that many seeds in so many obscure gardens. It is time for him to plant all of the healthy plants in one well-organized garden.
I speak on behalf of the Blockheads of the world. While I am not a card-carrying Blockhead, I am a fellow traveler.
If I had something really juicy on him, I would be tempted to blackmail him to create this website. He is a defender of de-criminalizing blackmail, so I am certain that he would not be offended. I would defend myself by announcing this: "I read your chapter!"
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