Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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Neo-Year, Neo-Plans

Considering that I departed from last year’s plans for this blog, it’s likely that I’ll change course multiple times this upcoming year.

Here are the themes that I am going to push this year:

  • “The Great Tradition”
    • Want to give myself a more thorough crash course and leave behind some bread crumbs that other people can follow.
    • Suggestions welcome.
  • Anglo-American history and literature, with an emphasis on the ‘Anglo.’
  • More link bait:
    • Anti-feminism
    • Slagging the reputation of the American university system
    • Occasional linking to news stories for commentary
    • Ego-baiting
  • More reviews of good books, less commentary on articles, other blog posts, and navel-gazing meta discussions.
  • > 1 new book published. > 1 free book also published via KDP.
  • New WordPress framework, new theme
    • Mainly just need something with more easily editable CSS; already have access to a better framework and some premium themes.
    • Planning on creating more permanent resources / topic pages, so the design will need to become less minimalistic.
  • Need to invest in some site performance improvements (some I might be able to pay for with free-riding off of my other web projects)
    • Better hosting (current total page load speeds are bad).
    • More theme optimization.
    • Get a CDN together for images; include more images in posts.

That’s about it. Thanks for reading — there should be a lot more coming this year.

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2014 Recap

Later in 2014, my personal circumstances changed to make it so that I’m back to spending most of my days writing (the majority of which has nothing to do with this blog).

I started writing again after Christmas mainly because I didn’t like not-writing. There was no particular plan behind the blog other than that I wanted to write only longer, high-quality articles.  The only one that really turned out the way that I had hoped that it would was this one about the poor and the equality doctrine.

For most other things, there’s almost no correlation between how much effort that I put into something and how much people enjoy reading it. My most trafficked post of the year took less than five minutes to write, whereas others that may take hours of researching, writing, and editing earn maybe 20% of the traffic of the five minute reaction.

While traffic isn’t the only thing that I pay attention to, it’s the most easily quantifiable, so it’s what gets managed the most on my end. As I (hopefully) release some books and review more books by other people, I’m going to shift over to revenue/earnings as what I focus on, combined with my subjective interpretation, just because it’s what I focus on for all the other sites that I work with.

Most of the time, I try to avoid writing about myself, but there tends to be little relation between which work of mine that I think is good and what other people tend to think is good. I am only a mediocre editorial director, and a competent hack.

This makes some sense to me, because promoting something on the internet is generally 10-10,000x+ more expensive in terms of labor and service costs than just writing something, so really the writing part is only marginally relevant compared to actually getting the right material in front of readers in a format that they enjoy and understand.

For a good chunk of the year, I was satisfied with just writing my Tuesday column at Social Matter and screwing around on Twitter.

In November, I decided to try writing on consecutive days to see what would happen, and it resulted in a lot more traffic for much less effort, so I kept at it. What that meant is that the last two months of writing accounted for over 50% of the total annual traffic.

The increased scale gave me some more writing ideas, as did re-noticing how easy it is to get first page search ranking for lots of book and author related terms with reviews (I used to get a lot of search traffic on some of my older sites with book reviews of novels sometimes taught in schools).

So instead of the original purpose of this blog, it’s turning into more of a method for building useful connections, testing out various ideas to see if they resonate with readers, and as a way to introduce worthwhile books and other works to new readers.

Thank-Yous

  • Nick B. Steves for all the encouragement and for the weekly round-ups.
  • Free Northerner for linking generously and continuing to operate his neoreactionary aggregator.
  • Hestia Society for giving me a column and otherwise being helpful.
  • All my new correspondents and friends.
  • Moderators of /r/darkenlightenment and /r/newright for maintaining mostly solid forums as islands in the garbage-ocean of reddit.
  • The NRx eldars for all their generous intellectual contributions.
  • The original Soap Jackal for helping out  on a publishing project
  • The people who have trusted my book recommendations enough to buy products off of my Amazon links.
  • All the readers who pass my articles along to friends.

Here’s to a better 2015.

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Oil Producers Caught in the Business Cycle

David Stockman summarizes a report from our friends at Goldman Sachs explaining that over $1 trillion in global oil investments excluding US shale are going to have to be either mothballed or run at a loss  given the recent downturn in the price.

The Goldman tally takes the long view of project finance as it plays out over the next decade or more. But the initial impact of low prices may be swift. Next year alone, oil and gas companies will make final investment decisions on 800 projects worth $500 billion, said Lars Eirik Nicolaisen, a partner at Oslo-based Rystad Energy. If the price of oil averages $70 in 2015, he wrote in an email, $150 billion will be pulled from oil and gas exploration around the world.

An oil price of $65 dollars a barrel next year would trigger the biggest drop in project finance in decades, according to a Sanford C. Bernstein analysis last week.

What happened here? Why did investors put so much money into sophisticated, high-cost oil production?

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk theorized that lower interest rates (indicating a lower cost of capital) encourage investors to put their funds into a ‘lengthening of the capital structure’ (meaning the physical as well as financial structure of production). Hayek, one of his students, noted that when interest rates are forced lower by state policy, it creates a false signal to invest more into earlier stages of production.

You have the Fed going to our respected friends & sponsors in the premier banking houses, giving them free money through various special mechanisms, and then those investors must find uses for that capital that they can credibly make a business case for.

This is what happened with the boom in unconventional oil production: a combination of high commodity prices, combined with nearly infinite available funds for long term capital investment, lead to a mad scramble in speculative development.

Because it’s paradoxically easier for investors to get credit than it is for consumers, you get the classic business cycle effect of excessive investment relative to real market demand. The thumb of the sovereign presses down on the ‘investment’ segment of the economy, while letting the ‘consumption’ segment languish.

The theory motivating this, per Keynes, is that directing funds towards investment through state action results in a ‘multiplier’ effect closer to the consumer. The theory frequently goes awry with the crashes, which are explained away as criminality, an outbreak of ‘animal spirits,’ ‘irrational exuberance,’ or other such statements.

In the contemporary case, the savings of consumers are actively suppressed through low interest rate policy, whereas accounts that might have been compounding at 5% per year at instead compounding at less than 1%. The consumer is being prevented from recovering his purchasing power, while investors are being supplied with ample credit for any scheme that can be credibly proposed, or are otherwise using the money to speculate in the financial markets.

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