What I Learned From Peter Leeson Today

I just learned of a new economist named Peter Leeson. Because I am not an Austrian economist, I do not know about the particular economists in that rank, but Peter is an Austrian economist. I found Peter's name by chance while on Chris Blatman's blog. Chris linked to a new article by Peter cleverly titled An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization. It was published in 2008 in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy. The article is an analysis of the criminal organization of maritime pirates during the middle of the second millenium, and specifically, how institutions of law and order were designed in the absence of governments. I suspect this paper, and others by Peter, will take on the same kind of case study to anarcho-capitalists and libertarians as David Friedman's work on Iceland once did. That is, that private markets can find efficient solutions to market failures without governance. Anyway, back to Peter. I was just curious, and so looked at his CV. Wow. The guy got his PhD in 2005 from George Mason, spent what looks like little more than 2 years at West Virginia, then went back to GMU as full professor. This year, 2008, has been an exceptional year for him. He's got the JPE, a Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Law and Economics Review, Public Choice, Economics Letters. Everything after that is more or less in very lowly ranked journals, but that doesn't mean the papers are bad per se. Peter's an Austrian and so publishes in Austrian outlets, which given his stellar 2008 year, makes me less likely to write those pubs off than I normally would having not read them myself. Anyway, unbelievable. So I dug around some more and found this flattering story about him from the Mackinac Center. By age 17, he'd read Human Action three times? Hmmm. That's three more times than I've read it, though I'm staring at it on my shelf right now.

Anyway, I'm deeply impressed. So of course I wrote Peter and asked him what his secret was. How in the freaking world does he practically manage to crank all that out? I mean, I'm sure the truth is that there is considerable variability in quality on that CV, but so what. The guy is doing what he loves obviously. I remember once being in a poetry workshop in college, and having someone from another university come into town to talk to us. She was an established and successful poet, and we novice poets were on pins and needles wanting advice and input. One guy asked an interesting question. He said he was writing a lot of poems that read like a thesaurus. That is, like the words were just fancy words, and he couldn't make it stop. What did she suggest? Her advice was gold (how do people come up with advice like this? Am I saying advice like this and not knowing it? Anytime I try to give advice, it's always stupid compared to this!). She said it sounded to her like he needed to get those words out, and she just encouraged him to write them out. I mean, yes, of course. Write the stuff out. You have a paper inside you, then you write it out. That's sure as hell going to be more productive than trying not to write it out. Besides, I bet you 1000 dollars Peter Leeson had to write through some really bad papers to get to his 2008 papers. That, too, I learned from a poet - William Stafford this time. Guy wrote a poem a day his entire life, and what became clear to me is that poems, if they are inside you, have a tendency to queue up. So you can say you want to get to the really good ones, but if they're queued up, then you're not going to get there til you get there. And that means, like the first lady said, writing it out. I think economics is the same thing. The difference is that unlike poems, you can't really crank through them. You can't write an economics article a day, for instance. You can, though, study what interests you. Even if it's not fashionable, and even if it doesn't seem important, you figure out what you care about, and then you work on that. I think Leeson does this, from the looks of his CV. All that austrianism and law and economics and anarchy. That's because he loves that stuff.

Anyway, I'm going to do it too. I'm going to make this summer work. NOt sure what a realistic goal is, but come June 1st, I'm the proud new owner of a freaking expensive new dataset, and I'm going to start work on it. And when I'm done, I'm going to send these suckers off and move to the next thing. So I learned a lot today. From Emily Oster to Peter Leeson, I learned a lot about the craft, or at least had it reminded to me again.