By James

As I wrote a couple of years ago, I don’t post here anymore. I just have a couple of updates for people who subscribe and may be interested in my work.

1. I upgraded my personal website to the 21st century.
2. I have a new book! The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts is coming out on June 20 from the New Press. My co-author is Stephen Bright, a legendary death penalty lawyer (with a 4–0 record in Supreme Court cases), longtime director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, and one of my professors at Yale Law School. You can read more at the book website or you can pre-order it via the New Press site (or directly from your favorite retail monopolist, of course).
3. I used to tweet about everything I wrote, but I may stop doing that as Twitter continues its descent into oblivion. So the best way to keep track of what I write is probably to subscribe to my Medium page here. If you don’t want to give Medium your information, you can get an RSS feed of my stories, or you could bookmark the page itself. Or you could follow me on Facebook. I will try to put a quick post there if I write something that is published someplace else.

By James Kwak

I’ve been asked if you can sign up for email notifications when I write stories on Medium. Apparently you can, but the option is a bit buried. (One of the nice things about Medium is the clean interface. One downside of that clean interface is that sometimes you have to go looking for things.)

If you’re on my main page (jamesykwak.medium.com), you have to click on About at the top.

Then you get to this page, and at the bottom there’s a link to an email subscription form.

I hope that helps.

By James Kwak

I’ve decided not to post on The Baseline Scenario anymore. I’ve thought about this on and off during the several years that the site has been mostly dormant, but I never pulled the trigger, mainly because this blog still has thousands of email subscribers and an unknown number of followers on Facebook. But I obviously haven’t been into blogging for a long time now, and it feels weird to continue using a platform whose peak was in 2010 and 2011 (when we were regularly listed, with reason, as one of the most important finance and economics blogs on the Internet). As you’ve probably noticed, Facebook, Twitter, and the consolidation of media platforms (the Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Vox, etc.) has killed off most independent blogging. In addition, while Simon and I rarely disagree on anything, we tend to care and write about different things, as evidenced by our latest books—his on investing in science and technology to create better jobs, mine on partisan politics and expanding the welfare state. Both of us also write about issues that have strayed far from the original focus that drew in our core readers—primarily, the financial crisis and financial regulation. For example, the book I’m working on now is about injustice in the criminal legal system.

I owe this blog a lot. Without the blog, there would have been no “Quiet Coup” and hence no 13 Bankers, which got me fifteen minutes of fame, an academic job, and a new career that has lasted a decade so far. There would not have been the day that Larry Summers sent an email to the National Economic Council staff saying that The Baseline Scenario was required reading. I would not have met some good friends, some of whom have gone on to be far more influential than I ever was.

The blog itself will stay up indefinitely, taking up space on the Internet. Simon may choose to post here in the future, so don’t cancel your email subscription if you have one.

I will continue to write, occasionally at least. The primary place I will post things is Medium; you can find me at https://jamesykwak.medium.com/. For a while I’ve been posting articles in both locations, there and here. I just posted an article about this year’s presidential election that you can read on Medium. I’d be flattered if you decided to follow me there. I also have a Twitter account, of course; I spend little time on Twitter (because it’s awful), but links to things that I write get posted there. I have no plans to use Facebook (because it’s also awful).

Good bye, and thank you for reading.

By James Kwak

You may have noticed that my blogging has tailed way off over the past few months—to, well, just about nothing. You probably noticed that it was pretty spotty for a long time before that. The main reason is that I’ve been busy with a new teaching job, which requires some effort on academic publications, and raising two small children. The other major factor is that I often just find I don’t have much that’s original to say. Financial regulation is a pretty heavily covered field, and I don’t have the time to be a real expert on, say, derivatives clearinghouses, and—believe it or not—I generally try to avoid posting if I don’t have something new to add. I tried to get back into the flow in the spring semester, when I was only teaching one class, and that worked for a while. But at the beginning of the summer I started doing some part-time consulting for my old company (I’m on unpaid leave from my law school this semester), and that’s made it impossible to keep up with the news, much less write something interesting about it.

That said, I still like to write. I’ve started posting occasionally on Medium, which I like both for the gorgeous interface and because it isn’t organized as a reverse-chronological list—which means that I don’t have to worry as much about saying something newsworthy before the moment passes. This week I wrote about playing Minecraft with my daughter (OK, it’s mainly about the Microsoft acquisition) and one of my favorite topics, why megabanks run on bad software.

I don’t know how long I’ll be keeping this up, but in the meantime my plan is to write an occasional post here summarizing things that I write on Medium or elsewhere on the web. As usual, I’ll also post new articles to Twitter more or less immediately after publishing them.

Thanks for reading.

By James Kwak

I contributed a chapter to Is U.S. Government Debt Different?, a book published by the Financial Institutions Center of Wharton. It includes chapters by many people more distinguished than I, such as William Bratton, Peter Fisher, James Hines, Howell Jackson, Deborah Lucas, Steven Schwarcz, Richard Sylla, and others. You can download the whole thing for free at the link above. Enjoy.

With WordPress.com, you can’t modify your blog in a sandbox and then promote it to production. Things will be unsettled for a couple of hours.

Update: OK, I think I’m done for now. I’m pretty confident the page nav problem is fixed (thanks to a custom menu). I killed the image at the top of the page to save on white space. We may not need the third column, but we will next week. The Twitter feed filters out all tweets that are just robotic notifications of new blog posts, so it is 100% non-redundant with the rest of the blog.

If the fonts are too small (most common problem, I think), read this (bottom section).

By James Kwak

As you may have noticed, we’ve been making some changes to the site recently. The main thing is that I decided we needed two sidebars in order to make it into the 21st century. I’ve been looking for a good theme that has three columns but doesn’t have dynamic page navigation (those links across the top), because we have pages that shouldn’t really be made so prominent, but I couldn’t find one. So I switched to this theme, which has three columns but also has dynamic page navigation. Now the problem is that the page navigation is buggy: right now it’s showing pages that no longer exist, pages whose titles have changed, etc., and it seems to change mysteriously from time to time. I’m hoping it will settle down in the next few days. I’ve generally been very happing with wordpress.com, but this is totally infuriating.

By James Kwak

At the suggestion of an anonymous commenter, I decided to use Vienna, an open-source OS X RSS reader, to download monthly feeds and “print” them to PDFs, so the blog archive is now up to date. It wasn’t quite what I was looking for, since I wanted an online solution, but I don’t mind installing new software on my Mac as much as I minded it on a PC.

By James Kwak

Last month a reader pointed out that many of the links in the blog archive were broken. The problem is that Feedbooks, the service I was using, no longer allows you to transform RSS feeds into PDFs. I fixed the links up through April 2010, but the problem is that I no longer have an elegant way of creating new PDF archives. Basically I need something that will allow me to type in an RSS feed and will generate a PDF from that feed.

For example, this is the feed for May 2010, in forward chronological order. When I type that feed URL into Chrome, I get raw XML. When I type it into Firefox, it gives me truncated versions of each post. When I type it into Safari, it gives me full posts, but in its infinite wisdom, it sorts them in reverse chronological order; the sort by date feature only allows reverse chronological. When I type it into Google Reader, I get full posts in the right order, but I lose the post dates (they are replaced by the current date). Bloglines is like Safari — it insists on reverse chronological. RSS 2 PDF only gives me post titles. FeedShow displays nothing.

If I could get any of these to work in any browser, I could just convert that to a PDF and be done. Any suggestions?

Update: To be clear, saving a web page (or anything) as a PDF is not the problem. It’s trivial on a Mac (and not that hard on a PC, either). The problem is getting the full text of all the posts in the feed, in the proper order, with the proper dates, on one web page.

By James Kwak

I know you can’t wait to hear my thoughts on the NCAA basketball tournament, but I’ve put them on my personal blog. I used to have a personal blog, and one my friends said he preferred it to The Baseline Scenario, so I started a new one recently for things that don’t have to do with economics, politics, business, the law, or the like. I post to it occasionally — just whenever I have something I want to say that doesn’t feel like a Baseline Scenario post. You can visit it or not, as you choose.

By James Kwak

Tomorrow I’ll be writing the February 18 post for the3six5, a collective diary written by 365 different people, mostly creative/artistic/media types (which I am not, in case you hadn’t noticed). The post should be a diary entry for that day — so, not an analysis of the Treasury’s proposal for Fannie and Freddie, for example. But if you have any suggestions feel free to let me know.

By James Kwak

I know you can see Simon somewhere virtually every week (OK, that’s a big exaggeration, but you know what I mean), but I wanted to let you know about a couple of talks I’ll be giving. I’ll be the featured speaker at the NS Capital Fall Financial Symposium in Stamford, Connecticut, on October 7 (free, but pre-registration required).

On September 15, I’ll be the keynote speaker at the Washington Credit Union League Convention in Seattle, but for that one I believe you need to register for the conference.

See you.

Update: I forgot to add that I’m also talking on a financial reform panel at Yale Law School on September 28 at 6 pm.