Looking back at 2023, Looking Forward to 2024
Some Reflections on the Past and the Future
I generally like to publish a post on Christmas Eve about something related to Christmas. But after having written about Christmas’s deadweight loss two years ago and Christmas and the ontology of rule-following last year, I fear that this time I’m lacking inspiration. Instead, I will contribute to another tradition, the one that consists of reflecting on the year that is ending and on the one that is coming. This is necessarily kind of a personal post, but with also more general and impersonal considerations.
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Looking Back at 2023
I’ve to start by mentioning that 2023 has been a very special, and by all standards, fantastic year at the personal level. I’ve been engaged and, four months later, married. I traveled a lot and my relatives and I have been healthy. I wish everyone to live such a year I’ve been living in 2023.
At the academic level, the year has been fairly good too. I’ve had a couple of papers accepted – more or less the standard number for me over the past 10 years – and made significant progress on my book project, though I still have to secure a firm contract from a publisher. I hope that it will be the case very soon. I’ve also, quite unexpectedly, obtained a bonus for the next 3 years from my university for my research and teaching activities. I’m not doing my job for money – public French universities do not pay well – but it’s always good news, especially when you’re not expecting it!
Maybe more significant this year has been my foray into a more public kind of intellectual activities. I’ve published an op-ed in one of the major French weekly outlets and participated in a radio broadcast on techno-libertarianism for the French public radio. Especially in the last case, it was an amazing experience and I definitely intend to develop more extensively this side of my academic intellectual job, though I’m definitely aware of its demands and potential dangers.
Writing for this blog has taken a significant amount of my working time, though I have generally tried to benefit from “economies of scale” by using the material produced here for my research and, more occasionally, the converse. I’ve written this year 55 posts (not counting this one). Considering the summer as well as shorter occasional breaks, this represents on average more than a post written every week when I’m professionally active. A typical post oscillates between 1000 and 2000 words, though some have been slightly longer. In general, it takes me 2 to 4 hours to write such a post, plus eventual readings that I sometimes do specifically for it. All in all, these are around 200 hours that I allocate yearly to my blogging activity, a quite substantial amount. I don’t plan to revise this allocation for the coming year, as I think I’ve found the right balance.
As every year, I’ve read a lot. Not only books but also substack blogs and, of course, academic articles. Regarding the latter, it is naturally difficult to pick one among the many I’ve read but if I had to, I think I would mention the 2023 paper of Simon Niemayer et al. in the American Political Science Review that offers a very enlightening and important empirical account of the effects of collective deliberation.[1] As for books, I have definitely less difficulty. I’ve been quite impressed and fascinated by Jeremy Jennings’s Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America.[2] This is an amazing biographical account of one of the most insightful political thinkers of the 19th century but also a deep reflection of the role of travels in the construction of one’s thought. Even if you’ve not read Tocqueville before, you will learn a lot about him and the countries he has visited. Eventually, you can be disappointed by Tocqueville’s imperialist views about Algeria, but you will be definitely impressed by his foresight about America’s democracy or his comparative account of Germany and revolutionary France. Definitely recommended. I would also mention the first volume of Hayek’s biography by Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Hausinger, though technically published in 2022.[3] This is the definitive account of Hayek’s intellectual life up to 1950 and I’m looking forward to the second volume. Finally, regarding older books that I’ve read this year, I’ve been positively surprised by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.[4] It has been very fashionable recently to bash Fukuyama for his optimistic prediction – made at the end of the 1980s – that liberal democracy and capitalism constitute the last stage of the evolution of human societies. Well, read the book and you’ll find a far more sophisticated and nuanced view. There are many things that Fukuyama got wrong, as he admits himself, but there are also many aspects that are still relevant to understanding the crisis of liberal democracy. It would be a mistake to disqualify the book for its failed prediction.
With respect to substack blogs, I’ve taken pleasure in reading but also at times engaging with Eric Schliesser’s writings. I’m impressed by Eric’s productivity but, more importantly, I’m learning from each of his essays. We have been able to engage in some conversations as our writings largely overlap and I must say that it has been really rewarding. I’ve also enjoyed many of Scott Sheal’s podcasts and articles and I strongly recommend Lionel Page’s Optimally Irrational blog for its thorough and scientifically informed posts using behavioral science to explore a wide range of phenomena. These are not the only blogs that I find interesting, and I would virtually recommend all those that are on the recommendation list on the right-hand side of the welcome page of this blog.
Looking Forward to 2024
What to expect for 2024? Putting private considerations apart, my first aim is to put the final dot to my book project. Ninety percent of the book is already written but some revisions are to come, so let’s say that I would be very happy to send the final manuscript to a publisher by the end of the year. I’ve a couple of nice articles in the pipeline that are currently in R&R with reasonable prospects of being accepted and eventually published in 2024. And there is the 7th International Conference of Economic Philosophy that we are organizing in Reims next May, a very exciting if time-consuming project. Also, I’m seriously considering moving for a new job, eventually to a university abroad. This may not be for next year, but this is definitely an option on the table for the near future (readers who have information about interesting places looking for someone with my profile are kindly invited to contact me!).
As I said above, I plan to keep up the pace regarding my blog writing. I don’t have any well-defined strategy or editorial line that I would like to develop, but my idea is to continue to produce pieces on a reasonably diversified range of topics. Also, I’m thinking about how to use the blog to support my increased participation in the public space, as I mentioned above. Of course, ideally, I would like to gain a broader audience for this blog but, well, this is not something that you can really control.
I have to say that I’m getting less and less enthusiastic about writing academic articles. In many ways, I think that the peer-review system is broken and that academic journals are no longer the best medium to convey ideas. I will not stop writing academic articles but the times when I was aiming at publishing a significant amount are definitely gone. There is no perfect substitute, however. Substack offers a different approach to producing and circulating ideas, but it is illusory to think that scientific conversation can fully take place here. Against the current – at least the one that is dominating in many academic and non-academic circles – I don’t think that books belong to the past. I’m already thinking about two future book projects, based on some of my recent articles and on the stuff I’m writing here. One would be about – roughly – knowledge in politics and would build on my work on epistocracy. I don’t conceive this book as a defense of epistocracy but rather as an exploration of the idea that political legitimacy is partly grounded in knowledge and competence. The other would be concerned with liberalism and the public justification of liberal principles in the age of AI, slowing growth, environmental crisis, and populism. I think most current defenses of liberalism are not updated to current challenges and keep on repeating old arguments that have proved convincing last century but are weaker today. I’ve also the intuition that – contra what many contemporary liberal authors think – liberalism and its defense are tightly related to a philosophy of history that must be asserted. This is only an intuition that I’ve yet to explore, but I’m fairly excited at the prospect of doing so here in particular.
At a less personal level, there are events that I’m looking forward to for the coming year, though not necessarily with great enthusiasm. I will mention three of them:
· New developments in AI, especially LLMs. I think most of us still underestimate the economic, political, and maybe even philosophical incidence that AI will have in the forthcoming decades. It is also true I think that most of us, including some who are disserting a lot about it, don’t really understand what is behind LLMs and how they could change our ways of life. I claim no particular expertise, just cheerful curiosity as well as vague and still unarticulated concerns. At the pace the technology is changing, we can reasonably expect that 2024 will bring new developments to reflect on.
· Olympic Games in Paris. As an economist by training, I’m sensitive to the fact that big events like the Olympic Games would almost never pass the test of a serious cost-benefit analysis. But this edition is even more problematic. In the context of the environmental crisis and the rise of populism, spending a huge amount of resources to organize a sports competition that will de facto be attended by a small economic elite (look at the prices of tickets) is hard to understand. There are also strong reasons to be concerned about serious logistic problems such as Parisian public transport that is definitely not fit to welcome millions of spectators. I don’t predict an apocalypse – the Games will be held, and all stakeholders will self-congratulate, but the insistence of French politicians to organize them is just an illustration of a major factor that explains the widespread defiance toward elites.
· U.S. Presidential Elections. We have been used to living in a world where we could be confident that within our democratic form of life, an ostensibly racist and misogynist liar who conspicuously disregards basic social and legal rules of personal and political conduct would stand no chance at the presidential elections of the main liberal democracy in the world. But not only this person is a former president of this country, but he actually has, according to polls, a serious chance to be elected again next November. We should no longer be surprised by this state of affairs, as it is part of the new populist-democratic equilibrium. Still, this election will be a turning point. The electoral performance of populists (who I define as anti-elite leaders and political movements ready to disregard foundational rules of liberal political morality to achieve their aims) over the last two years has been uneven with major successes (Netherlands, Italy, and a lesser degree Germany and Sweden) but also serious setbacks (Poland, Brazil). Trump’s victory would send a strong signal for the future – and though 2027 is still relatively far, I cannot but anticipate that the next French presidential election is likely to be in the same vein.
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Though I finish this post on a rather negative note, I still hope for the best for 2024. And before leaving 2023, let’s have a good end of the year. For those of you who have read this post to the end, as a thank you for taking the time to read my stuff, here is a small gift: a compilation of the “best” or most significant pieces I’ve published here. This small ebook was realized for the two years of the blog back in October so the most recent posts are not in it, but this is the opportunity to (re)discover some of the oldest pieces.
Greetings from Hurbanovo, Slovakia (where it is snowing and I’m doing snowmen as I’m writing this post!).
Merry Christmas, joyeux Noël, veselé Vianoce!
[1] Simon Niemeyer et al., “How Deliberation Happens: Enabling Deliberative Reason,” American Political Science Review, March 9, 2023, 1–18.
[2] Jeremy Jennings, Travels With Tocqueville Beyond America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2023).
[3] Bruce Caldwell and Hansjoerg Klausinger, Hayek: A Life, 1899–1950, First Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
[4] Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin Books, Limited, 1992 [2012]).