One extra keystroke

Without:

Readers of this blog will be familiar with this argument. For those who are not here is a brief recap of the evidence supporting our claims.

With:

Readers of this blog will be familiar with this argument. For those who are not, here is a brief recap of the evidence supporting our claims.

Go for it.

Too many thoughts

Maybe it's different if you're writing fiction. But writing about the economy, I often find myself deleting an interesting observation, simply because it's the second observation and it detracts from the first observation.

Separately, they might be interesting. Together, they create confusion. Or so I think.

Dealing with holes in a Swiss cheese brain

I sometimes have a thought pop into my head, a one-liner that suddenly makes sense to me. It seems to be a direct quote but it must be a distillation of something I read. Reading Keynes, for example. He doesn't usually write one-liners. So I wake up one morning and say "Oh, Keynes said you can only either spend money or save it." And in my mind, the you can only either spend money or save it part is what Keynes said -- his words, not mine. And that's how I think of it.

And I've had a couple times when I went looking thru The General Theory for the particular phrase. So I could document it in my writing. Looking till my head hurts, but not finding.

Doesn't mean that the exact phrase is not in the book. But by the time my head hurts, when I give up the search, I'm convinced that the exact phrase is not in the book. At that point, I have to think that those particular words are what Keynes said, but my version of it. I don't know if that's correct, but it's what I have to think in order to proceed.

After that, I might say something like Keynes said you can only either spend money or save it. No quotes, so it looks like I'm paraphrasing him. But attributed to Keynes, so I'm not stealing the words.

It's a compromise that lets me move on to the next sentence.

No, those are the same word

It started out as a joke. I said I'm retired now and I might be going senile. But then I googled senile because it's not a word I use often and, you know, because maybe I'm senile. I googled it. The first three results were good. Here is number four:

First, they "explain English by way of Greek" (I wish I knew where that phrase came from) ... or in this case, maybe by way of Latin.

And then they say "senile" is

in other words, someone showing signs of senility.

But that's not other words. It's the same word: Senile.

The better word

I may have mentioned this already: My method of proofreading is to start at the beginning and read until I have to change something, then change it, then start at the beginning again.

It's a good method and I rely on it. But sometimes it gets to be days and days of proofreading and I'm still on page two.

(Yeah, this is one of those times. Counterfactuals and the Common Trend on my Econ blog, if it ever gets finished.)

It's hard work. But re-reading the sentence with the better word is always satisfying.

Oh hey, Happy New Year.

That would be who

From Investopedia:

The Employment Cost Index (ECI) is a quarterly report of compensation costs that is released in the final month of the quarter... All non-farm industries are covered, with the exception of federal government employees (which only make up 2-3% of the work force).

Federal government employees are people. For people, we use the word "who". Therefore:

... federal government employees (who only make up 2-3% of the work force).

For the opposite case, see WHICH, not WHO

//

Didn't know the Federal workforce was so small, did you.

Quality

From Chapter 17 of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
by Robert M. Pirsig

To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself. He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard and averaged the rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings, and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class average...

At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their question now was "All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?" ...

He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline...

Now, in answer to that eternal student question, How do I do this? that had frustrated him to the point of resignation, he could reply, "It doesn't make a bit of difference how you do it! Just so it's good!" The reluctant student might ask in class, "But how do we know what's good?" but almost before the question was out of his mouth he would realize the answer had already been supplied. Some other student would usually tell him, "You just see it." If he said, "No, I don't," he'd be told, "Yes, you do. He proved it." The student was finally and completely trapped into making quality judgments for himself. And it was just exactly this and nothing else that taught him to write.