It was the Summer of '17

Time to check in, what with, oh, a year passing since the previous post. Should I chronicle the slew of missed deadlines, or focus on the odd past success or the ambitious agenda for the weeks ahead? Perhaps a smattering of all...

Loose ends to tie up:

(1) complete "Vice Policy in Russia: Alcohol, Tobacco, Gambling," which I presented in November, 2016, but do not yet have a complete draft ready to post on ssrn.com; my new due date on this one: July 1, 2017 [as a side note, let me mention that I intend to upgrade my very poor Russian this summer];

(2) revise and post on ssrn.com "Selling Hope, Casino-Style." I have a complete draft, and presented it twice (in March and April, 2017); time to put on the finishing touches. Due date: July 8, 2017;

(3) revise the Parthenon Marbles paper -- I have never been happy with the last few pages. Due date: July 15, 2017;

(4) possibly revise, and maybe seek to publish, the cocaine regulation paper. Due date: July 22, 2017.

(5) take a look at my paper with Randy Beard, "Compensated Live Kidney Donations," and think about revising it or submitting it somewhere. I sort of like this paper, but like most of my papers, can't think of any obvious outlet for it. Due date: July 29, 2017.

So much for loose ends? As for my ambitious agenda on the reading front, this summer I hope to read up on animal welfare and policy. First in the queue is Can Animals Be Moral?, by Mark Rowlands. (One year ago, incidentally, I committed on this blog to reading Narconomics, by Tom Wainwright, and this is a case of the odd success.) And as for the research/writing agenda, well, I'll try to make some headway on my behavioral economics stuff...

Mann Act Book Review and One Missed Deadline...

...or at least one that I am willing to acknowledge. But I will start with something completed, as foreshadowed in my previous nDrafts post: a book review of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI by Jessica R. Pliley, available here. Further, the short paper on regulating cocaine has been completed, as has been the referee report on a paper concerning addiction. Oh, and yes, my reading commitment has been fulfilled, with The Parthenon Enigma, by Joan Breton Connelly, added to the "books promiscuously read" pile. OK, so I did manage to take care of a few loose ends in the last couple months.

As for the missed deadline, that refers to the revised version of a paper about the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum. The new (missed?) deadline is April 18. I'd also like to begin to at least muse over the paper for this fall on vice policy in Russia, and hmmm, what to read, what to read? How about The Righteous Mind, by Jonathan Haidt?

Loose Ends Revisited, and Next Steps

Some 8 months ago I noted the status of a few "loose ends;" I thought I would take this opportunity to update those, and to indicate some plans for the next, uh, 8 months or so.

The loose ends, and the updates:

(1) reading a book on prostitution policy and writing a review of it; this is complete and the review should appear forthwith;
(2) revising markedly a second kidney compensation paper; this is complete.
(3) writing a paper on the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum; this is complete, and
(4) preparing a paper on vice policy for a conference in Russia; this is complete. A Russian language version of the paper should soon be available(!).

The next few weeks involve revising the Parthenon Marbles paper; I hope to post updates on Five Drafts. In this same time period I have to write a referee report for a paper concerning addiction --  I only mention it here as a personal reminder and spur to action. I also intend, over the next few months, to write another Russia-related vice paper, this time covering alcohol, tobacco, and gambling. There will probably also be a second paper (topic yet unknown) to employ some of my time in these next 8 months, and there are rumblings of the next book. When the book project materializes, I will post more here; the other projects are likely to be discussed or lamented on Five Drafts.

Oh my goodness, I almost forgot -- in the next few weeks, I hope to produce a short paper on regulating cocaine. 

I am always game for trying to commit to reading a book or two, too; right now, let me make that commitment to The Parthenon Enigma, by Joan Breton Connelly -- I already am well into it, so I am feeling confident. 

Law and Econ Project, Update X, etc.

OK, there has been a 16-month hiatus in posting. Does that mean there has been a 16-month hiatus in progress on the Law and Econ draft? Discriminating folks like myself are unwilling to reveal that sort of sensitive information.

But where do things stand? Well, I sent a revised -- yes, so there, there was "progress," I knew you would get it out of me -- manuscript to unnamed university press in October of 2013, and have received back three helpful sets of comments, with a fourth one in the pipeline, it seems. Irrespective of the manuscript's fate at unnamed university press, I feel like a few months of revisions are ahead of me -- even with my low standards, the manuscript isn't quite where I would like it to be right now. As for the nature of those revisions, I think for the first pass I will follow the advice of the anonymous reviewers. The hope is that the "continuous improvement" project will result in a tighter, more coherent manuscript. Right now I am happy with many of the individual sections, but not with the overall package. Perhaps I'll save more details for a follow-up post.

One part of the LandE project that has been upgraded, I think, is that concerning selling kidneys -- actually, multiple sections of the manuscript involve kidney sales, oddly enough. These revisions owe a lot to my friend Randy Beard, an expert on organ procurement, who kindly co-authored a symposium paper with me; a less-than-final version of the paper is here, in pdf format.

Back when this blog was "active" I used it to mention books that I was intending to read -- books both related and unrelated to the Law and Econ project. I am happy to report that in 2012 I really did finish reading The Knockoff Economy by Raustiala and Sprigman. Subsequently, I read three of the Oxford Introductions to American Law (Contracts, Property, and Torts, in that order -- I liked Torts the best), though I could do with a refresher on much (or all) of the material. The books that are in the pipeline by and large I am not willing to commit to reading at this point, even to the limited extent to which mentioning them on a blog is committing. Some of my reading continues to be devoted to behavioral economics, which I am slated to teach for the third time in the spring.

Today's return to nDrafts was motivated by a return to Five Drafts, a return that was itself motivated by a need to produce a vice policy paper in the next couple of months. And I have other blog projects that require attention, oh yes they do...

Well, it is good to be back with my online to-do list, even though it is hard to say why.

Inaugural Post (August 14, 2011)

Eight months before a symposium paper was due, I set up a blog, Five Drafts, to establish a schedule for producing, well, five drafts of the paper. The idea was that the loose public commitment to meet the self-imposed intermediate deadlines -- and later, to update the blog with regular progress reports, in between drafts -- would help me overcome procrastination and would spur effort. To some extent, the Five Drafts experiment worked. My hope is that nDrafts will successfully adopt the commitment-via-blog technique to other academic projects. My fear is that nDrafts will instead demonstrate a virtual Peter Principle, where a successful idea is promoted to the point that it will no longer be viable. But here we go...