2023 was the year I gave my blog a name, although not much else changed. Illness and the demands of my real job meant that the pace of blogging was still fairly sporadic. Going through an end-year review of what other people liked, and what I liked, showed some good stuff in both categories–and enough overlap to keep it fun.

The top five most popular posts, according to the WordPress statistics:

1. The best books I read in 2023. The 12th annual installment in the longest-running feature of the blog; I’m rather surprised and pleased that it still attracts interest.
2. Breaking down China’s manufacturing. My crunchiest economics post of the year: some estimates to establish basic stylized facts about how much China’s manufacturing serves domestic demand and how much serves external demand.
3. Max Weber on journalists. A typically insightful digression from Weber, an excerpt from his famous 1919 lecture on politics.
4. How Chinese ruined a perfectly good gender-neutral pronoun. I don’t write much about Chinese per se, even though I’ve spent more than two decades struggling with the language, so it was fun to do a little linguistics essay. Most of the credit for this one should go to David Moser, language maven and pianist, whose work is the basis for the piece.
5. Interpreting China’s policy reversals. Written shortly after China’s pivot away from Covid restrictions, this was an attempt to survey the different schools of thought about the drivers of that reversal. I think it still holds up fairly well.

My top five favorite posts that weren’t among the most popular:

1. Searching for Xuanzang. I wanted to write more book reviews last year but this is the only one I completed, of the Indian historian Romila Thapar’s journals from her 1957 trip to China. I was pretty pleased with how this essay came out.
2. Xi’s new growth synthesis. My most comprehensive attempt to explicate the current political economy of China macro policy at the start of Xi Jinping’s third term. I’m still using this basic framework.
3. The political economy of financial discipline. An account of the political economy of China macro policy over 2017-2022. Although admittedly speculative, the analysis in this piece has held up quite well, as China has moved further away from policies of financial discipline over the course of 2023.
4. China wants those low-end industries after all. An explanation of one of the significant recent changes in Chinese official rhetoric on industrial policy and “industrial upgrading.”
5. The best music I heard in 2023. I read a lot and have pretty good taste in books, but I venture to say that I have even better and more-informed taste in music.