Before we get started, buyer beware. This blog is explores a theory of leisure. My other blog, The View from Bogota, is about applied leisure, and is a bunch of essays and observations on diverse topics, from blackberry picking to poetry. This blog, on the hand, delivers a theory of leisure based on human capital economics and investment strategy. I think its terribly interesting stuff. You may not. Invest your time and human capital accordingly.

A note on footnotes: there aren't any. This began as an effort to reconcile Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class" with Huzinga's "Homo Ludens" and Pieper's "Leisure, Basis of Culture". Along the way I found memes, evolutionary biology & sociobiology, fractals, systems theory, all sorts of things, most of which were necessary to . A life time worth of reading contributed to my theory, and like Huzinga, I'd rather write than cite. I haven't found anything like this in the literature on leisure, though Steffens and his serious play comes close. Like Joan Robinson (another hero of mine), I'd rather think than do math, so this a work of conceptual, not mathematical economics.

I continue to learn. I've read some Fouccault and know I need to read more. But its always like that. Read a little, reveal some ignorance, read to solve that, reveal a little more. Makes a guy wonder about education. In any case, if I waited to write until I'd done all the reading I should, I'd never write a word. This was Huzinga's point too. So for better or worse, off we go. Before we go any further, I need to take a nap. That's applied leisure, so I deal with it elsewhere. More later.

Kicking off the first summer of a new decade, I thought it appropriate to share some thoughts about leisure. Leisure, as I've come to understand it, isn't much what you think it is. In fact, when you take a nice long look at it, you find yourself handicapped by vocabulary. We simply don't have enough words to examine leisure's many facets with much precision. This leaves our thinking vague, which is too bad because if we understood leisure better, we might enjoy it more, and more of it. That would make the world a better place, which is plenty of reason to write about The Discipline of Leisure.