The unvarnished truth has splinters

Welcome to Gathering Goat Eggs. I’ve been writing on the internet under variations of the Goat Eggs banner since 2005. At first I hosted my own blog on the now defunct powerblogs platform. I then joined a group effort with a few like-minded libertarian/ conservatives that is still soldiering on without my assistance as The New Reform Club. Those were heady days in the early blogosphere, when a few opinionated amateurs could get picked up by Newsweek or National Review and thrust into the fame spotlight for a few weeks. (As I recall, the issue that put us on the radar was our noisy opposition to George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. God, that makes me feel old.) I also wrote on LiveJournal for several years. Life changes and social media pushed those longer-form, more thoughtful venues to the background, and I — like everyone else — gravitated to the shallower and murkier waters of social media, which have turned out to be a barrier to rather than a facilitator of communication and discourse.

I have had an unusual education and career track that had led from labor economics to science and energy policy to medical informatics to data analytics of health care. I have always been naturally inclined to be skeptical of authority, government, and received wisdom. I received a solid education in data gathering, statistical analysis, cost- and risk-benefit analysis, and research design that I have found useful to apply even in areas where I lack subject matter expertise. In fact, I think that SMEs are often blinded by their content presumptions to serious flaws in what they believe are data-driven corroborations of their already-held views.

My intention in establishing this substack was to have a place where I could write and make public my longer-form meanderings on deficiencies in the way serious public policy topics are discussed in the United States. For now I have no intention of monetizing this effort, and cannot promise anything other than random, sporadically produced content. But if you would like to be notified when I publish something then please….