I'm getting older... Being "unaverage", whether in a good or bad way, takes a lot of energy and I don't have as much energy as I did when I was younger.
Yes, but you are still quite young, I think.
You really do lose interest in that sort of thing, once you reach your 30s.
There are always going to be people who do it so much better and more effectively than you. And by the time you're 30, they're all dead.
You're in your thirties????
All that talk of getting older and losing your energy had me picturing you as a dottery seventy-year-old. Now I (42)
really feel old! If you were here in this room with me, I'd hit you with my cane!
Seriously, in my field, economics, most of the major contributions were made by people 31 years old:
Carl Menger,
Principles of Economics; age 31
Ludwig Mises,
Theory of Money and Credit; age 31
Friedrich Hayek,
Prices and Production; age 31
Victor Aguilar,
Axiomatic Theory of Economics; age 33, though I was 31 when I sent it to the printer.
Of these people, none went on to greatness in middle age. The muse came to them and then she went. Hopefully, their biographies will show you young'uns some of the pitfalls that lay ahead of you.
Menger spent the rest of his life refusing to allow his
Principles to be re-printed because he was on the verge of writing his
magnum opus. He finally died in his eighties without ever writing it. Today, Menger's
Principles is considered one of the most important economics books ever. Nobody is really sure why he wouldn't let it be re-printed during his lifetime or what improvements he thought his never-to-be-written
magnum opus would include.
Mises made little contribution to economics after
Money and Credit until he was ressurected by the fame of his student, Hayek, in the thirties. In 1949 Mises wrote
Human Action, intended to be his
magnum opus, at the age of 68. (Admittedly, getting chased out of Austria by the Nazis and then spending the war years learning English in a New York apartment caused unavoidable delays.)
Human Action was a thick and ostensibly scholarly book, but it fell far short of
Money and Credit in original contributions and conspicuously failed to correct the problems in
Money and Credit. After that, Mises became a bitter old man and wrote a series of low quality papers targeted to the cult that was forming around him.
Hayek took England by storm when he arrived from Vienna to give a series of lectures at the London School of Economics in the 1930-31 school year.
Prices and Production was the transcript of his lecture notes. (His accent was too thick for his students to understand his lectures without notes.) But lecture notes aren't intended to be a
magnum opus. Hayek tried and failed to write a systematic treatise, leaving us today with
Prices and Production as his only work in economics. After the war, Hayek gave up economics and turned to political philosophy, at which he had more success.
At
FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK we read, "Hayek attempted to work a new system in his
Pure Theory of Capital (1941), which he originally envisioned as a part of a larger work. In it, he attempted to develop a joint theory of investment and capital. Inexplicably, his 1941 book fell dead-born from the press and proved to be his last substantial effort in the area of theoretical Neoclassical economics." Honestly, I tried reading
Pure Theory of Capital and found it dense and uninspired. Admittedly, publishing only months before the attack on Pearl Harbor was unlucky timing but, it is also true that, by 1941, the muse had left Hayek behind - she comes and then she goes.
I published
Axiomatic Theory of Economics a decade ago and, I can tell you, if it were somehow lost and I had to write it again, it would
never happen. I just wouldn't have the energy to go though all that again. I can remember the mountains I climbed, but I cannot remember where I found the energy I consumed in climbing them. Now I spend my time promoting my theory on the internet. Hopefully, I won't become a bitter old man like Mises or fall to the siren song of catering to the sycophants in society who are always trying to form a cult around someone.
On the subject of this thread, striving to be normal, I have a page on my website that addresses this topic in a humorous way:
Has anything like Axiomatic Economics been done before?
