Liberty and Welfare

There are a number of possible trajectories for those of us who write books. One possibility is that the quality of the books we produce is uniform. For example, we could write uniformly poor or mediocre books, or uniformly good or excellent ones. The other possibility is that the quality is not uniform, but actually goes up or down. The worse alternative here, of course, is when the quality goes down. Then our best work is in the past. This unfortunately is the case for many authors. It was the case for John Rawls, for example. Nothing Rawls wrote subsequently surpassed his first book, A Theory of Justice. Alternatively, one could be writing better and better books. This alternative, I think, is the best. It is even better than to have always produced books of exactly the same high quality, because authors always hope to do better than they have done in the past, and producing something of even higher quality is always possible.