Why Beautiful Economics now has its own address
The page stays. But a post that disappears in two days is a bad place to keep something you want people to use more than once.
For a while, Beautiful Economics lived entirely on Facebook. That was never a decision so much as a default — it is where people already were.
Here is what finally bothered me about it.
A post has a lifespan of about two days
Write something careful, publish it, and it does well or it does not within roughly forty-eight hours. After that it is effectively gone. Not deleted — unreachable. Nobody scrolls back. Nobody searches a feed. If a student asks me in March for the thing I wrote in October, I cannot find it either.
This is fine for a conversation. It is a strange way to treat an explanation that was true in October and is still true in March.
Reach is rented, and the landlord sets the rent
Whether a post reaches two hundred people or twenty thousand is not decided by me and not decided by the people who chose to follow the page. It is decided by a ranking system that can change next Tuesday and owes nobody an explanation. Pages that built an audience over years have watched it evaporate in a month without being told why.
I am not angry about this — it is Meta’s product and they can run it as they like. But building something long-term on top of it is like putting up a building on land you are not allowed to read the lease for.
The uncomfortable part
I spend my working life studying what competition for attention does to the quality of what gets published. The short version of the problem: when many outlets chase the same limited pool of reader attention, the pressure runs towards sharper headlines and thinner substance, because that is what wins the click, and the honest version loses.
Then I went and published inside exactly that machine. Every incentive in the feed pushes against the thing the page is supposed to do — explain something properly, including the boring qualification at the end.
A website does not fix this. Nothing fixes it. But it removes one layer of the pressure: here, nothing decides whether you see this except whether you came looking.
What changes, practically
Nothing goes away. The Facebook page continues, and will carry on being where most people first run into this. What changes is where things live.
Every explanation now gets a permanent address. You can search it on Google, send the link to someone, cite it, or come back in three years and find it exactly where it was. There is a concepts section that will keep growing, a library of PDFs you can download and keep, and no account needed for any of it.
And there is an email list, which is the only honest way I know to reach people who asked to be reached. If you want this in your inbox instead of hoping an algorithm shows it to you, that option is now yours rather than Meta’s.
That is the whole change. Same writing, better address.