Year 1 of 🍋Asymmetric Information

73 posts; 60,000 visits. Thanks all round to those who've made the digital version a success!

It’s just 12 months since NZAE launched the digital version of Asymmetric Information, replacing its prestigious, but dead-tree and snail-mail, predecessor.

We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed. And to present some statistics, because we know you — our loyal readers — like to see the data before drawing conclusions.

Resolution Island, Fiordland National Park. Dave Heatley

73 posts & 60,000 visits

We published 73 posts — roughly 1.5 each week — in the past year. Traffic continues to build, as shown in this graph of total visits (page and email views). In total, we had around 60,000 visits in Year 1.

Around 330 people signed up for free subscriptions. Total subscriptions, including NZAE members, sits at 634.

Subscribers are concentrated in NZ, the US and Australia, with a splattering across the world, including the UK, Taiwan, India, Japan, Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, Austria and Germany.¹

Seventeen different authors have contributed posts. A big thank you to them all! Our regular columns now have their own pages on the AI website: see Blogwatch (Paul Walker) and 2B RED (Grant Scobie).

Most read posts

In case you missed them, here are our top 11 posts for the year:

• Members divided on doughnuts, missions & circles

• The case against zero-priced public transport

• Is ChatGPT the first true word processor?

• An economist staggers into a hospital...

• When did Strategy become a sub-genre of Fantasy?

• Re-evaluating Sweden's Covid policy "experiment"

• Make-good clauses, skifield restoration, & public finances

• Bankruptcy for Mt Ruapehu’s ski field operator

• Land covenants: Why pay to limit your options?

• The efficiency of using AI to write an economics paper

• How far for government-funded fibre?

All received more than 1000 reads during the year.

Spoof paper competition

Frequent contributor Grant Scobie is the winner of the inaugural Asymmetric Information spoof paper competition. His entry was An a-peel to the data.

Would you be willing to support AI financially?

AI is run by volunteers, and its authors receive no payment. But it does have some costs — these are borne by NZAE members through their membership fees, and through the generous sponsorship of Survey Design and Analysis Services, the Australasian distributors of Stata.

If you currently have a free subscription to AI, would you consider supporting us financially? You could join the NZAE (or renew if your membership has lapsed). Alternatively, would you be willing to pay for a supporters subscription at say NZ$5/month or NZ$50/year? If so, please use this button to indicate your support. (Note that you will not be charged unless and until we decide to start receiving payments.)

Either way, we will continue to produce great content and send it to all subscribers, including free ones.

Colliding acronyms

Using “AI” for Asymmetric Information is problematic, because that other AI, Artificial Intelligence, comes immediately to mind. Longer alternatives like “AsInf” and “AsymInfo” look clumsy in print. The wonders of Unicode mean that we’re no longer limited to the Latin alphabet. Should we fashion a better "acronym”, for example: A⤨I, A⥂I, A↬I, or🍋AI?² What do you think?

Acknowledgements

Thanks, as always, to our contributing authors, and to those we draw upon to subedit and provide comments on drafts.

But especial thanks to you, our readers. If you like AI, or a specific post, please share with others to build our readership network.

Feedback

As always, we’d appreciate feedback. What’s is going well? What’s not working for you? Who would you like to see writing, and on what topics? Please email us, or make a comment on this post. (Comments on this post are open to all subscribers.)

And feel free to submit or propose a post! A rough outline is sufficient – we’re happy to work with you to knock it into shape.

Coming up in Year 2

Posts might be a bit patchy for the next month or two. Dave is heading back to Resolution Island in Fiordland to clear a few hundred stoat traps. (And to refresh his photo collection — see above for a pic taken there in March.) And then he will be distracted by the ski season.

Olivia will be filling the gaps. We will also be scaling back our regular member surveys to one per two months, rather than one every month.

We have some great content coming. Posts in gestation include Pricing regulation and university failure; Cost-benefit analysis and the co-benefits fallacy; What shares should local government own?, I=PAT: when not to reason from an accounting identity; and How to find a capital gains tax. Stay tuned for an even better Year 2!

By Dave Heatley & Olivia Wills

1. Determining a subscriber’s location is an imprecise process on the internet. This is the data provided by the Substack platform. Treat it as a rough guide only.

2. See, for example, Unicode arrow symbols.