Dear subscriber,

Finally! After literally years of fear and hesitation, I am now jumping out of the cliff by launching this newsletter today. Writing in English about economics is something I wanted to do for a very long time, but I never dared to — for many reasons, but it will not surprise you that impostor syndrome ranked high on the list. I am not sure what happened to make me jump the cliff, but here I am!

So I am launching my newsletter — but to write on what exactly? Well, you are probably here thanks to Twitter, and so you already know that I am an economist. It is then not a surprise that I will primarily write about, well, economics.

This newsletter is not my first one (for instance, see here), and I know from experience that you need time to figure out the topics you want to write about regularly. I do not want to rush anything, and I want to keep this whole endeavor enjoyable for you and me, so the upcoming months will be exploratory.

So far, I plan to write on agent-based modeling in economics and on topics such as diversity in economics and the studying of economics itself — the discipline, not the economy, something called logology. You may also expect a few things about reproducibility.

I also already have a couple of drafts on coding. Economists do write a lot of code, but usually we do not take the time to do it healthily — both for the code itself, but also for the person who writes it. I think there are interesting conversations to have here — besides the usual and overall useless “R or Stata” pseudo-debate, as R is obviously way better than anything else. Duh. (Jokes aside, the best software is, in my opinion, the one that allows you to get things done.)

Something I should probably address from day one is that I do not start this newsletter as a hobby. I want this newsletter to stick, and as such it has to be economically sustainable. I will launch a paid version somewhere in the future. Paid members will have access to exclusive content — and probably other perks.

Writing this newsletter is a major undertaking for me. Being able to make a living out of my writing would be awesome — and it would be even better if I do not have to choose between writing and economics. I am both an economist and a writer at my core—I have been writing since I am probably 10. And I love economics, I love the community I have found on #EconTwitter, and I have the feeling that the best days of the discipline are in front of us.

Yes, launching this newsletter is definitely scary — but also very exciting! I cannot wait to share my thoughts with you.

See you in the next issue!

Olivier