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Where's Rory?

-Dave Hart, 'A Call for Reader Feedback'

Hi friends. I have indeed been deficient in upholding my duty to provide the yearning masses with the kind of sophisticated insights and mind-blowing revelations they've come to expect from IPE Journal. I have quite a viable excuse (cue Dave's inner monologue), but for the sake of argument lets pretend I have been locked in my basement toiling over a masterful blog-post, tentatively called "The normative implications of Pinochet's pension reforms: deconstructing the post-war regulatory state." Ok, not really.

Anyway, my lack of consistency is nothing new; its something I have lacked since we began this little project. As Dave noted in his previous post, we've had periods of boom and bust since last August, but to Dave's enormous credit his busts have been more like blips. Nobody is more impressed by his commitment than I am.

My problem has been a fundamental one: a lack of incentives. Don't get me wrong: we started this site with nothing more in mind than providing a minor, thoughtful contribution to the debate on where our global economy is headed, and I think we have largely achieved that. Sometimes we get sidetracked by booze or expenses, though in our defense a) booze is the prism through which many of us deconstruct the world around us, and b) when such a scandal occurs in Africa it is called 'corruption', but when it occurs on the bank of the Thames it is a 'betrayal of trust.'

But without a more tangible incentive, even the noblest of pursuits can falter under the weight of competing alternatives, and I have found it difficult to sustain my contribution to the blog in a year defined by a gruelling job search and nomadic-like existence. It is not that I have lacked the time, I've had quiet a bit of that over the past 12 months. Rather, I have gone through periods of profound intellectual disillusionment, the circumstances of which I'll spare. That has been deeply disappointing and my sporadic work here has been but one consequence.

But that has turned over the past month or so, and I expect my consistency here to do so as well. Shorter, more frequent posts may be one result, but that probably serves our readers better anyway. And it helps when your partner is a rock star at this. Dave carries the torch well.

Catharsis complete, thanks for sticking with us this past year. You should see our childlike joy at getting an email from a reader. That's what this is all about.