Dear friends and colleagues, 

I hope you all had an enjoyable holiday break. 

I wanted to bring to your attention my new (completely free) Substack page, The Problem of Policymaker Ignorance: https://policymakerignorance.substack.com

I will be using the page to publish and promote various material related to my research. I have already published a short post summarizing my work on the consequences of policymaker ignorance. The first episode of my new podcast, The Week in Policymaker Ignorance, is also now available on the Substack page (and should also be available on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.) 

The main purpose of the Substack page is to give away my new book, Dialogues concerning Natural Politics: A Modern Philosophical Dialogue about Policymaker Ignorance. In his famous Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, David Hume concluded that the assumption of an all-knowing and all-powerful God was neither necessary nor sufficient to explain natural phenomena. Dialogues concerning Natural Politics tries to do for social science what Hume did for natural science. Both books challenge the assumption that some epistemically privileged being – God in the case of natural phenomena and God-like politicians in the case of social phenomena – must be invoked to explain relevant phenomena.  

I plan to start posting the book to the Substack page a chapter at a time in mid-January. The complete text should be available by the end of January, at which time I will also post the full book to SSRN, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu.  

If you teach courses in political economy, political philosophy, or social science methodology, you might consider adopting Dialogues concerning Natural Politics as a teaching text.   

• The book is designed to promote in-class discussion. Each chapter of the book addresses a distinct topic or problem of political analysis. Many of the topics raised are purposely left unresolved, leaving room for further discussion and debate.  
• Each chapter concludes with suggestions for further reading and a set of discussion questions that might be either assigned as homework, employed as exam questions, or used to promote further dialogue and debate in the classroom.  
• The book carefully avoids partisan stances on substantive political matters. Indeed, the book is critical, in about equal measure, of both the left and right endpoints of the political spectrum.  
• Dialogues offers a model of civil discourse concerning various fraught political controversies. In an era of political polarization, the book offers a reminder of what genuine civic (and civil) discourse looks like.   

All of the content on the Substack page, including the book, is free to subscribers. I do not plan at the present time to add a paid-subscriber option.  

If you’re inclined, I hope you will subscribe. If you’re on social media (I’m not) and find something interesting on the Substack page, please feel free to promote it.  

Best,