Life, Liberty, and Economics Goes Live

McGill students found online politics and economics journal

Courtesy of Richard Carozza and Carter P. Smith

The founders of Life, Liberty, and Economics are dedicated to promoting accessible, intellectual discussions.

Two McGill students recently founded an online journal, Life, Liberty, and Economics, a McGill-based publication whose mission is to “change dialogue.” Carter P. Smith, the Executive Editor, established this publication with co-founder Richard Carozza over a little more than a month of planning and saw the publication go live last week. In this interview, the founders of Life, Liberty, and Economics discuss their planning, editorial process, and journalistic doctrine. The publication can be accessed at: lifelibecon.com.

David Lin: What is Life, Liberty, and Economics?

Richard Carozza: It’s a fact-based journal of commentary from students at universities around the world.

Carter P. Smith: We want to have contributors from many parts of the world so that we can have many different points of view. That’s one reason I came up to McGill from New York, which was that I could find another perspective on the world.

DL: How did you get started?

RC: It was just an idea that one of us had at some point. We’re both American, and in American politics you’re used to things like Fox News and even just the mainstream media….everything is about sensationalism. You take the real big economic, political issues that are intellectual, but the media has just dumbed it down; they’ve turned a reasonable argument, like a left-brain argument into a right-brain. It’s all about sensationalism and emotion and saying, oh, I don’t like this person, I don’t like this idea, and rather than discuss it I’m just going to get angry at it.

CPS: It’s all about competition of ideas. It’s not about finding a common ground in the intellectual sphere; it’s about right versus left, one side versus another. For me, what it was…I realized that there were so many issues out there that could be better explained.

DL: Would you say that you’re here to patch in the holes that mainstream media has left?

RC: I wouldn’t say patch the holes as much as reshape the conversation, because the conversation is just wrong. It’s not a matter of fixing – you can’t fix something that’s inherently wrong. It’s the fact that you turn on the news, and you don’t really get any news out of it. You turn on the news and there’s no basic understanding of economics or how everything works.

CPS: It’s essentially a dumbed-down version of the political sphere, and it’s saddening because everything is based off of conjecture. People can say things so easily, but backing [statements] up takes a little bit more guts, and I think we can present that to the world.

RC: Another big thing is that all of our articles are cited. We provide sources for everything because we want to say that not only can you read our opinion, you should go back and read the news yourself so that you can understand and form your own opinion.

CPS: We want you to be convinced of our opinion, but we also want you to be able to think for yourself. We want to inform debate. In fact, we actually present our own political biases on the website. We want to make sure that people understand where we’re coming from.

DL: I noticed that you have three sections: Society, Politics, and Economics. How did you decide on this content structure?

RC: At least from my perspective towards American media, politics and economics have largely been divided as if they’re two different issues. They’re not. It makes no sense, because ultimately, almost everything in the world comes down to economics, or has some aspect of it. So I don’t know why politicians are all lawyers; there are very few economists in congress. [Economics] is one of the most important governing forces in the world right now.

CPS: In fact, [economics] is the biggest threat to national security right now, in most countries.

DL: How is economics a threat to national security?

RC: Because if you look at all the major countries right now, the US, China, the EU…most of them aren’t interested in gaining more power and more land, because that doesn’t gain anything for them; they’re worried about trade deals.

CPS: We’re past the time when just land and people provided the basis of power.

RC: China and the US aren’t going to engage in a war over some land territory. The only reason for which this may actually happen is if there was some sort of dispute over the play of power, and even then, the type of warfare they’d plan to conduct would be trade embargos and try to drive the other into the ground [economically].

DL: Where did the title of the publication, Life, Liberty, and Economics come from?

CPS: The name came from the Declaration of Independence. John Locke originally said “Life, Liberty, and Property,” Jefferson said, “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that’s why we’re Life, Liberty, and Economics, and underneath that, and the pursuit of Common Sense, a play on Happiness.

DL: Who is your target audience?

CPS: I’d like to be able to make economics and politics accessible, but not “dumbed down.”

RC: It should be a readable version of something that to some, may seem too intellectual to bother reading. A lot of times people like the idea that an article is simple and is all emotion. I can understand that, I can empathize with that. However, we should make it so that these seemingly “intellectual” conversations should be accessible to everybody.

CPS: We started off with people interested in politics and economics, and they’re already thinking about these things. We can inform their own debates with their friends and their colleagues, but I think that as we get bigger, that more people will be reading it, and it will branch out. People will understand that you don’t need to be an economics major to read more economics articles.

RC: In fact, I’m actually in science, so [the content] should be accessible to everybody.