Back to life a bit

 This blog has recently been less active than it used to be, but a regular source of weekly posts is about to resume. With the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium resuming this Tuesday (you can see the schedule here), I will resume posting weekly ruminations, if that’s the best word, regarding that week’s paper.

A few points about this exercise:

1) Since our sessions are off the record to allow for frank discussion, I don’t comment on the discussions themselves, although they may help to shape the thoughts about the paper that I end up posting here.

2) For multiple reasons, I do not trash or criticize the papers, which would be (a) unkind and unfair given my platform here, (b) bad for business in multiple ways, and (c) bad for personal relationships in what I have found on the whole to be (at least 90 percent of the time) a very amicable field in which people generally interact constructively. This is not to eliminate the possibility of one’s reading between the lines regarding how persuasive or helpful I found a given paper’s analysis. But then again, when I look back at my own past writings I may feel today that I was sometimes closer to the mark than other times.

3) My main interest in these posts, and also to a large degree in the sessions as well, is not does the paper succeed, or even how can it be made better (although I am happy to explore that with any interested author), but rather what we all together can learn about how best to understand the issues that the paper raises.