The Mathematical And Moral Case For You Becoming A Paid Subscriber

In which I shill. Also a more general case for being a paid subscriber to blogs you like.

I’ve started paywalling some of my articles because I want to make some money off this blog so that I can spend the summer reading and writing rather than getting some boring job at Starbucks or something. To be clear so as not to mislead people—the stakes are not that high, I’m not desperate for money or anything; I just want to spend the summer reading and writing about philosophy and other interesting things rather than getting a boring low-skill job. I am not in financial distress—I just want an interesting summer. I blog quite a lot more than most people—given this, I think that based on plausible assumptions about how much one enjoys my articles, those of you who read regularly should become paid subscribers!

There are a bunch of altruistic reasons to become a paid subscriber. First of all, I give away my excess money to effective charities and both plan to and do live quite frugally. So extra money given to me is probably mostly going to go to effective charities anyway. Other than flying out to debate Caplan, buying food, and paying rent, I barely spent any money this year.

Second of all, more money will allow me to read and write more over the summer rather than working a job. To the extent that I’m reading and writing, seeing as writing is a public good (there’s significant consumer surplus from my articles that I don’t get paid for), one would expect it to be underproduced. It’s nonrivalrous, so for the standard reasons economists give, one would expect it to be underproduced. Thus, getting a paid subscription subsidizes something that we’d expect to be underproduced in a free market.

I get about 1500 article views per day. If we assume conservatively that each of them provides 1 cent worth of benefit, then I’m generating about 15 dollars worth of consumer surplus daily, or about 5,500 annually. But I’m only getting about 2,000 dollars annually. It’s the thing economists hate more than all else—a market failure!—that you can rectify. This seems especially conservative if one thinks that I’m right about things—I’ve heard quite a few people who have gone vegan because of my article May The Factory Farms Burn and probably more people have that I haven’t heard about. Hopefully, at least some of my articles advocating things have changed some people’s minds in positive ways. If we assume more plausibly that article views provide 3 cents worth of benefit then I should be getting about 16,500 dollars yearly. The same thing is true of writers in general—because writing is a public good (well it’s not technically non-excludable but it’s at least costly to exclude so relevantly like a public good), we should expect writing to be a massive public good. Scott Alexander, as of 2024, had about 100,000 Subscribers—this means he provided regular enjoyment to a population about a third the size of Iceland. Despite this, however, he made from his blog somewhere around 380,000 dollars per year at the upper end. Scott Alexander almost surely provides much more benefit to the world than, say, two Google programmers who each make 200,000 dollars, but because of the economics of writing, he’s being vastly underpaid (relative to the value he’s producing—he’s obviously making a lot overall).

Third, if I spend the summer reading and writing about philosophy, that will be good for my job prospects long run. It’ll give me opportunities to work on extra papers and read more philosophy, as well as about other things, which increases the odds I’m a public intellectual in the long run, by increasing my grad school chances. All of this was enough to convince Tyler Cowen to give me money last summer, and if it’s good enough for Tyler Cowen, it’s good enough for you!

But suppose you’re not convinced by that. Well, I think there’s a strong prudential case for being a paid subscriber to my blog rather than other blogs. I write about an article a day and about half of them will be paywalled. Assume that you read 2/3ds of my articles. This means that each month being a paid subscriber will get you about 10 extra articles, of better than average quality (for I paywall the better ones).

Assume that each article takes you 10 minutes to read. That means that for 7 dollars, you get 100 minutes of enjoyment—potentially more if you spend time afterward thinking about them. This is more than is typical from 7 dollars—if you buy, say, a pizza, you’ll only get more like 15 minutes of enjoyment, and 7 dollars is pretty cheap for a pizza. So if my articles are even 1/6 as good as pizza, it’s worth subscribing.

This is a good reason to only be a paid subscriber to blogs that publish a lot. If someone writes, say, one article a week, being a paid Subscriber probably isn’t worth it. But if they publish very frequently and you enjoy their work, it makes sense to become a paid subscriber.

Additionally, if you have a blog yourself and become a paid Subscriber, I’ll read it closely and recommend it if it’s good (unless so many people with good blogs become paid subscribers so doing so would make the recommendation function meaningless, but that’s quite unlikely).

Of course, none of these considerations are enough to make being a paid subscriber as good as giving to a top GiveWell charity. So give to that first. But if, after that, you have other money you want to spend on things…I have an idea of where you could spend it.

Also, if you don’t like my articles that much, it’s probably not worth it. Similarly, if you think my articles are bad for the world because of my nefarious utilitarian agenda, you should probably not become a paid subscriber.

I’ll also be very grateful for you and like you more than my free subscribers (sorry free subscribers—I like you all too!).

Definitely don’t feel any pressure to do so, especially if you are facing financial trouble. But if you do become a paid subscriber, I’ll be very grateful! Even if not, I’m glad to have you. It’s fun to have the thoughts that I fire into the void be read and appreciated by people. Not to flatter you all too much, but I’ve found my commentors to be mostly quite interesting and high-quality. So thanks!

(Behind the scenes footage of me writing this article).