Year in Review + Exciting (?) Announcement
Did anyone actually read this newsletter?
We survived one year of writing this newsletter! Many thanks are due.
Seriously though, thanks to everyone who subscribes and shares our posts. We are currently over 1,500 subscribers. For such a niche, weird newsletter, that’s awesome. Thank you!
We wanted to take this anniversary to reflect a bit on how things went over the first year. First, what were people interested in?
Most Popular Posts of the Year
We received the most viewers (this includes email views and website views) when we were really out of step with the popular consensus. We started this newsletter to push back against some of the discussions online around economics, so that makes some sense. That’s our niche.
Brian dared to chime in on the minimum wage. Marginal Revolution picked it up, as well as NPR.com. 6967 views.
This one on monopolies by Brian is almost trolling. The theoretical point is true. People need to know that. But it’s said in a way to shock readers. 3242 views.
Our first post was a modest defense of supply and demand, which is a model that we are fans of (if we hadn’t made that clear in the past year). 3163 views.
Back in January, which feels like a lifetime ago, the world was losing its mind, not just about covid, but about GameStop. Josh tried to indirectly reason with people about the meaning of efficient markets. 2838 views.
Some people were triggered by our posts. None of our posts came close to the anger generated by Brian’s simple economic argument about the value of non-competes (including a ridiculous, clearly false claim in an email that Brian’s hair is bad). 2771 views.
Josh decided to join everyone else and complain about Econ 101. But this time, it’s not the same thing you’ve heard 1000 times from the chattering class on Twitter. 2662 views.
While these were our most popular, one thing that stands out in the data is just how steady the views are. Week in and week out we receive roughly the same amount of views. These “popular” posts are only slightly more popular (besides the top one that Marginal Revolution shared).
The steadiness is a good thing. We are writing these newsletters to be evergreen, not to go viral. Moreover, we are writing for our niche, which we know is small but has shown to be reliable as readers.
Economic Forces in the Classroom
The coolest thing about the past year is how many professors are using our posts in the classroom. Blackboard (a course management system) is one of our most frequent sources of traffic, along with other .edu websites. That’s great to see. Please keep it up!
If you’re new to the newsletter, here are a few more posts that may be useful in an Econ 101 class:
We don’t need all those silly assumptions to have competition.
On Bitcoin and competitive currencies
Anti-price gouging laws aren’t as bad as Econ101 maybe says. Or maybe they really are bad.
I was promised something exciting!
While we have loved writing the newsletter, we want to switch things up, both for us and our audience.
Next week, we will be dropping our first ever episode of the Economic Forces Podcast. Trademark pending. The video will be posted on YouTube and you can receive the podcast through the newsletter and your podcast app (once the first episode is posted). Make sure to subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss it.👇
For our first episode, we interviewed Larry White on his time at UCLA in its heyday and the connection between price theory and macroeconomics.
Don’t worry! The newsletter lives on. We will be supplementing the newsletter with interviews; the current plan is 1 per month. Basically, the podcast is just an excuse to talk to the people we want to about our favorite topic: price theory.
If you have suggestions for guests, especially if you can get us in touch with the guest, let us know via email or in the comments.