Thank you – and my plans for Himbonomics
Thank you – and my plans for Himbonomics
How the Triumph of Janet came into being
On February 14th, 2022, romance was, apparently, the last thing on my mind. Far more important matters were at hand than the love of my life: I tweeted a poll asking my followers if they would read an essay covering my thoughts on what I perceive to be structural failures in British politics and political outcomes, not thinking much of it.
The results, after 225 votes were as follows:
Yes - 73%
No - 27 %
The poll indicated there would be 164 readers of my essay, if we were to take the poll results at face value and assume 100% conversion. What happened next could not have come as more of a surprise. The Substack post reached an audience comparable to that of a Sunday newspaper.
I had people I’ve respected for years, whom I regard as some of the best, most erudite and insightful in their field, get in touch to tell me that The Triumph of Janet was a fantastic, seminal piece of work. I found myself a little ‘side hustle’, writing on politics for publications such as UnHerd, and think tanks have reached out with research proposals. And of course, there were plenty of subscriptions to this newsletter.
So the primary function of this post is to give thanks and express my gratitude to everyone that signed up to the Himbonomics Substack. With a subscription, each of you has clearly implied I have something interesting and valuable to say, and I really appreciate that.
I want to repay that investment in me by continuing to write about subjects that I’m interested in on this medium, and I also want to commit to doing more than reposting links to posts on other platforms, most likely covering ideas that are less commercial for political magazines.
Because I cannot commit to posting here on a defined, regular schedule, while I have enabled paid subscriptions (upon the advice of a kind subscriber), I will keep all posts free. I think this is the fairest approach – one that allows paid subscribers to give additional thanks for the content – but without setting strong expectations on either side. Himbonomics is, for me, led by ideas, not finances.
The next post I hope to release, for which the research is nearly complete, will be on the subject of conflict necessity and the role of system design in conflict. We all know that some degree of conflict is useful in many scenarios. For example, a lack of conflict in politics quickly leads to sclerotic political, economic and societal outcomes – the Soviet Union being the most obvious example.
But there are many instances where conflict is entirely unnecessary and yields no net benefit for any of its stakeholders, purely because of system design. There are many instances of this where, for minimal outlay, significant net negative outcomes for society can be avoided. This is where I intend to focus the next essay.
To finish this post with what I hope are some useful final thoughts, I want to reemphasise how much the response to The Triumph of Janet was an entirely unexpected outcome. When I first sat down to write the essay, my intentions were in fact primarily to structure and organise my thoughts on the subject matter, to be more articulate when describing these phenomena with friends. I did not expect to spend so many hours thoroughly researching my ideas across many months to refine them, end up writing 6,000 words, and getting the reach I did.
Writing brings great clarity to unstructured thoughts. The process of committing pen to paper – or fingerstroke to keyboard – identifies unprocessed logical avenues, challenges assumptions, and enables the writer to identify gaps in reasoning. A written monologue on a political idea is, I find, much harder than a conversation. In a conversation, a continuous process of clarification occurs via questions, replies and body language. If a concept is poorly explained, it can be expanded upon and explained in more detail, before being closed off, after which the conversation can move on to the next consequential point.
In prose, it is necessary for a writer to anticipate misinterpretations, and to confer the concepts they are describing as clearly as possible, all while producing a text that is enjoyable and entertaining to read. Well, all the indications are that I achieved that with The Triumph of Janet. And in the meantime, I find myself coming back to the essay, to find cited documents and charts, time and time again.
My three takeaways from writing The Triumph of Janet are:
Talk about what you’re passionate about. Unexpected and delightful things can happen as a result
Humour is a great tool for creating engaging content. It also makes iconoclasm softer and easier to swallow. If you are pushing up against established societal norms, a tongue-in-cheek caricature is likely to be far more successful than outright contempt
If you think you’re confident on a subject matter, try to write down your thoughts on it. You’ll quickly find it’s much harder to explain than you think. Commit the time to writing about it, and you’ll become more fluent, identify logical gaps that need closing off, and become a better advocate for your ideas
Thank you for reading Himbonomics. If you are engaged by this content, please consider subscribing here.