It is now 7 AM, Saturday, January 20. If all goes well, this will be automatically posted at 3 AM Monday morning, January 22.
I woke up late this morning: 5:30. I got up and turned up the thermostat to 71. Then I went back to bed.
Then I had an epiphany.
I have been thinking all this week about the structure of my magnum opus: the scholar's edition of Christian Economics. I finished the final corrections on volume 1 this week: the student's edition. My typesetter has two manuscripts to typeset: the teacher's edition and the second edition of The Covenantal Structure of Christian Economics, published online in 2015, but which I had to re-write late last year.
On Friday, January 19, I tried to come up with an outline. I was not happy with my initial attempt.
At 5:30, it hit me. I now know what I will do with my magnum opus. I will do something revolutionary. I am not exaggerating: truly revolutionary. As far as I know, it has never been done before. It breaks with the Western academic tradition.
I will use two forbidden words throughout the book: "I" and "you."
This is regarded as bad form in academia. It is acceptable in classroom lectures or op-ed pieces, but never in textbooks, and never in foundational academic treatises. Authors are occasionally allowed a collective "we," but never "I." As for "you" . . . This word is totally unacceptable, professionally speaking.
Why?
THE GRAND ILLUSION
Academic social theorists are involved in a grand illusion. It begins with self-delusion. It begins with a series of presuppositions, all of which are incorrect. These are:
1. Academic theory must be value-free (a value-laden judgment).
2. The universe is impersonal (says a highly personal scholar to highly personal listeners).
3. There is no socially binding ethical system (says a scholar who recommends policies).
4. Social causation is amoral (says a scholar who regards himself as deeply moral).
I intend to break with this tradition.
I am a professional speaker. More important, I am a professional writer of direct-response advertisements. I have known for over four decades that the two most powerful words in direct response marketing are these: "free" and "you."
I have been a public speaker ever since 1958: 60 years. The most powerful word in public speaking is "you." You can never go wrong by beginning your speech with "You."
If there is any academic guild that should understand this, it should be the economists. Economists teach, following Adam Smith, that personal self-interest is second only to scarcity as the fundamental presupposition of economic theory. Economists teach that individuals act in terms of rewards and punishments, benefits and costs. The entire science of economics is based on this presupposition. If this presupposition is incorrect, then economic theory is incorrect. Economic theory rests on a theory of causation, and this causation is based on people's quest to improve their circumstances.
But so powerful are the four presuppositions of academic social scientists that economists abandon their theory of economic causation when they sit down to write their scholarly articles, their monographs, their textbooks, and, which is always rare, their foundational treatises on economic theory. They do not begin where a copywriter begins: with the mental image of a representative reader. This reader represents a class of readers, called the targeted market. An experienced copywriter begins with this assumption: the reader cares about himself. The copywriter must address the desire of the reader or the viewer to achieve a specific outcome at the lowest possible cost. In other words, the copywriter begins with the assumption of the potential buyer's personal self-interest. This is why the two most powerful words in direct response copywriting are "you" and "free."
An experienced direct-response copywriter would never think of creating an ad without the word "you." He is trying to persuade the reader or viewer to take a specific action. This specific action leads to a series of follow-up actions that end in a sale. One of the fundamental laws of business is this one: "Nothing good happens until there is a sale."
An academician is trying to persuade somebody of something. It is always difficult to get someone else to change his mind. Yet this is exactly what an academician is attempting to do when he sits down and writes something. Incredibly, he refuses to use the word "you."
There is another law in direct-response marketing. Never use the word "we." Instead, use the word "I." An ad that uses the word "we" over and over is dismissed as a "wee-wee" ad. People trust individuals. They don't trust committees. They have learned over eons of bad experience that committees are less trustworthy than individuals. Committees tend to be more irresponsible than the individuals who form committees. Individuals are legally responsible, and most of us believe they are morally responsible. It is better to put a photo of the person running a business at the beginning of the ad, and not a photo of a committee. Whenever you see an ad with a photograph of several people who are part of "the team," you are seeing an ad that was not written by a successful direct-response copywriter.
PERSUASION
The art of rhetoric is the art of persuasion. An advertisement, just like a textbook, has to use logic. It must be believable. A good ad offers a reason why. This must be plausible.
Second, an ad must be based on grammar. The words must make sense. They must carry the logic.
Third, it must use rhetoric. The author of an academic treatise may not be self-conscious about his use of rhetoric, but if he is trying to persuade somebody of anything, then he has to use rhetoric.
Successful rhetoric begins with this word: "you."
A lawyer may begin his summation with this phrase: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury." That phrase has a long tradition. But if the lawyer knows what he is doing, he is not thinking about persuading the jury as a whole. If he is a defense lawyer, he is thinking about persuading one individual who will vote "not guilty," and then stick to his guns. The lawyer is going to speak to that individual juror, even though he does not know which juror it is. He has a mental image of that one juror who will vote "not guilty" and stick with it. The prosecuting attorney is attempting to persuade that one juror to switch and vote "guilty."
The economist would speak of this juror as the marginal juror. It is the juror at the margin who can determine the outcome of the trial.
This is how an author should always regard the reader. He should not write for a committee. He should write for the marginal reader who will change his opinion and from then on agree with the author. He will change his opinion, and he will not switch. He will become a hard-core defender of the position.
This is the only reader worth a book. Any author who is not writing to that marginal reader is wasting his time, his energy, and his life. Yet most authors of academic treatises do not self-consciously write for the marginal reader. They are trained from the beginning of their academic careers not to do this. They are trained to write for committees, mainly their academic peers. This is why academic writing is bland when it is not abominable. I despise it. I have always despised it.
Here are the three rules of academic writing. First, be accurate, given the limitations of the number of words you are allowed to write, and given the limitations of the readers of the journal or newspaper or website that you are writing for. Second, be clear. Third, be persuasive.
The professional academic is taught to honor the first rule. He is not supposed to lie. He is not supposed to fake the evidence. If he does this, and then gets caught, he could be expelled permanently from the academic guild. Members of the guild don't want to be lied to or deceived. They may wind up footnoting a book or an article in their own writing, and if it is later shown that the author of that book or article faked the evidence, this exposes anyone who trusts that author as naïve, poorly informed, and lazy. No academic guild member wants to have this happen in his career, so he is adamant about the illegitimacy of faking evidence. In other words, he is self-interested. No surprise here . . . at least not for economists.
In contrast, most academicians do not trust other academicians who are extremely clear in their writing. Thirty years ago, I wrote an article about Murray Rothbard. It was for a book honoring Rothbard. My article was titled "Why Rothbard Will Never Win the Nobel Prize!" I said that he wrote much too clearly to be eligible for that honor. I compared him with John Kenneth Galbraith, another economist who wrote clearly, and whose books sold extremely well. He also was not about to win the Nobel Prize. People who are taught to write in academic jargon are not interested in writing clearly, and they resent a small percentage of their peers who generate large book royalties from the general public because they don't follow the academic formula for acceptable prose.
I am going beyond Rothbard. I will use the word "you" in my magnum opus. He never did in Man, Economy, and State. I am not as good a technical economist as he was. I like to think that I am as clear a writer as he was. But I am a far better writer of direct-response copy than he was. He never wrote direct-response copy. When it comes to persuasion, I therefore have the advantage. The only other economist who has had my experience in writing direct-response copy is Mark Skousen. He also writes very clearly. He also will never receive the Nobel Prize.
MY TARGETED READER
I begin with a targeted reader. He is a mental construct. He represents what I hope is a large reading audience.
This reader is somewhere between the age of 25 and 30 years old. He is married. He has one child. His wife may be pregnant with the second child. He lives in a developing nation: sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or Asia. He is now facing the responsibilities associated with being the head of a household. This household is growing. His responsibilities are therefore increasing. He has to make decisions about what to do for a living. He also has to make decisions about what he's going to teach his children.
He is highly motivated to learn more about economics. He has read my student's edition. He has read my teacher's edition. He may have read my activist's edition. He has some background in my approach to economics.
Whenever you are operating in a competitive marketplace, you should begin by targeting somebody who is highly motivated to achieve a specific goal. If you can position your marketing in such a way that he believes that you can help him achieve his goal at a price he is willing to pay, he may take you seriously enough to take specific action steps. It does no good to write for somebody who is not highly motivated to change. You cannot afford the advertising expenses to change the minds of people who are not ready and willing to change because of specific motivations in their lives. It is your job to identify these motivations, and then show the reader that taking the action steps you recommend is the best way for him to avoid the problem, or achieve the results, that he is interested in.
If you are trying to change his behavior, you are making an ethical decision. This is why the myth of value-free anything is a myth. There isn't anything that is value-free. Everything that we confront in life forces us to make decisions. For most things, our decision is to ignore the situation. We are the beneficiaries or victims of hundreds of advertising campaigns every day. We ignore the vast majority of them. But, in making a decision not to make a decision, we are making a decision. Somebody didn't persuade us to take a specific action step. The old rule is true: "No decision is a decision."
This is why authors of textbooks and monographs start out at a tremendous disadvantage. They do not self-consciously target a representative reader of a class of readers who are ready to change their minds, and then write all of their text in terms of persuading this reader to change his mind and then change his behavior.
As with so many things in life, non-fiction writing is inherently triadic. The academic writer, as well as the writer of direct response advertising, has to balance the three goals: accuracy, clarity, and persuasiveness. Academics seek only the first. Rothbard sought the first two. I seek all three. This is why I will use the forbidden words, "I" and "you."
So, my strategy for my magnum opus is to start with my imaginary reader in the condition I think he will be facing. I will not start with Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island. I will start with the reader. He is the owner of property. He is responsible for his actions. He is part of a series of three covenantal institutions -- family, church, and state -- and also several voluntary associations. He therefore has multiple responsibilities.
He is interested in two things, both summarized by the word "right." He wants to do the right thing. Once he identifies the right thing to do, he wants to do it right. He seeks ethical goals, and he also seeks efficiency.
The science of economics has been devoted almost entirely to efficiency, and always at the expense of ethics. This has been true ever since Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776). It was not true of Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), but the only thing in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that carried over into The Wealth of Nations was the phrase, "the invisible hand." It was a metaphor. It was not a theological construct. But it surely had theological implications. It was a substitute for the providence of God. Smith was a deist who was a member of an officially Calvinistic church.
I have not come to a clear outline for my book, but I know what my procedure will be. I will begin with cosmic personalism, not cosmic impersonalism. I will begin with the providence of God, not the assumption of impersonal Darwinian evolution. I will begin with the assumption of value-laden economic theory. Next, I will identify the reader's primary area of economic responsibility: ownership. This is where all economic responsibility begins. Then I will move outward in a series of concentric circles. Each circle will be another area of his economic responsibility.
My representative targeted reader is not someone teaching in a tax-funded university or a government-licensed university. I am writing for a father of one, soon to be a father of two, who is economically responsible as the head of a household. He has read the student's edition of my book. I hope he has read the teacher's edition. I hope he has read the activist's edition. Now he is ready to move to a greater area of responsibility. He is ready to become a scholarly Christian economist. I hope there will be several thousand of these people. I hope that he will read my book and then conclude that he should become a scholarly economist. He will then pay the personal price to do so.
My magnum opus will be there on the shelf, or on a disk drive, in the same way that Karl Marx's published first volume on Capital was. (Volumes 2 and 3 were not published in Marx's lifetime.) It will be there as a reminder that, if the reader wants to move forward, there is a large, detailed book for him to read. I don't think many people are going to do this. I hope several thousand will over the next few years, or at least the next century.
CONCLUSION
It is now 8:55 AM. It is time for another 16 ounces of organic carrot juice.
In an hour, I will be at a Toastmaster's meeting.
This has been a productive morning. But I must write three more articles before the day is over. Busy, busy, busy.
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