Colbertism is an independent economics and markets publication: long-form essays that treat readers as intelligent adults, charts drawn by hand, formulas shown rather than hidden, and rules of conduct published where everyone can audit them. This page tells you about the publication: what it is, how it works, and where its money comes from. Its author has a page of his own: meet Eiga Aditya Radja.
About Colbertism, in One Paragraph
Most economics coverage arrives in two broken sizes: ninety-second explainers that evaporate on contact, and journal articles armored against outsiders. Colbertism occupies the middle ground on purpose. Every essay here runs long because the subjects deserve it, walks through the actual mechanism (the curve, the formula, the numerical example) because hiding machinery respects no one, and attaches each model to the real episodes that made it matter: a newspaper repricing its ads the month its rival died, freight rates collapsing after a steel box standardized the seas, tax codes leaving fingerprints on Georgian windows. If a reader finishes an essay able to reconstruct the argument for someone else, the essay has done its job.
Colbert, Louis XIV, and the Name on the Door
Colbertism borrows its name from Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619 to 1683), finance minister to Louis XIV and the most disciplined economic manager of the seventeenth century. Colbertisme, the doctrine history attached to him, was mercantilism run with bureaucratic precision: tariffs guarding the border, subsidies and quality standards for French manufactures, state-financed roads, canals, and merchant fleets, all pointed at one scoreboard, gold flowing into the kingdom rather than out of it. Colbert also left public finance its most durable joke, comparing taxation to plucking a goose: the art lies in getting the most feathers with the least hissing.
Naming a modern economics publication after a mercantilist is deliberate mischief. Much of the discipline grew up by refuting him: Smith and Ricardo took apart the export-hoarding logic piece by piece, a story told in full in our essay on comparative advantage and the container world. Yet Colbert’s questions never retired. When should a state steer industry? What do tariffs actually buy, and who pays for them? Today’s subsidy races and industrial policies read like his memos with new letterheads. Keeping his name on the door is a standing reminder of this site’s working premise: economic doctrines deserve examination rather than worship, and the oldest arguments are usually the ones still running the news cycle.
Six Shelves, One Library
Essays are organized into six categories that behave like shelves in one library. Markets covers market structure, competition, and auction design. Finance handles the price of time and risk: rates, bonds, portfolios, asset pricing. Policy takes on taxation, regulation, and public economics. Business examines firms, platforms, and network effects. Global follows trade, supply chains, and the world economy. Long reads cross those borders constantly, which is exactly why they are long. Every piece carries an “Updated on” date that means what it says: evergreen essays are revised when facts move, and substantive revisions are disclosed.
Method Before Opinions
Four working rules govern everything published here:
- Start from the canon. Arguments build on the standard results of each field and the empirical literature that tested them, not on vibes or headlines.
- Show the machinery. Every curve is drawn as a clean vector figure, every formula is stated in a display block, and worked examples use explicit numbers a reader can check by hand.
- Attach the world. Theory ships with its history: the case, the price, the dated episode. Reported figures are framed as reported; stylized charts are labeled stylized.
- Flag the uncertainty. Contested questions are presented as contested, and confident writing is reserved for settled mechanics.
Accuracy has a paper trail here. Before publication, formulas are rederived and figures are checked against their data; after publication, errors are handled through a public corrections procedure with dated correction notes. The full protocol lives in the Editorial Standards.
Rules Published, Not Implied
No sponsored content, no paid placements, and no undisclosed affiliate interest, ever. That sentence is contractual in spirit, and the documents behind it are public: the Editorial Standards and Corrections, the Advertising and Affiliate Disclosure, the Privacy Policy, and the Disclaimer that reminds readers, without hedging, that education is not investment advice. The whole policy suite is indexed at the legal hub. When a policy changes, the change is announced before it takes effect, and superseded versions remain available on request.
Money, Disclosed
Running costs are covered by clearly labeled display advertising served by third-party networks. Advertisers buy space, never sentences: no advertiser previews an essay, suggests a topic, or learns anything about individual readers from us. Ad targeting cookies are governed by the Cookie Policy, which includes working opt-out routes. If the funding model ever expands (reader support, affiliate programs), the disclosure page will say so before it happens, with rules pre-committed in writing.
Behind the Byline
Every essay on Colbertism is researched, written, charted, and corrected by one person: Eiga Aditya Radja, an Economics undergraduate at Diponegoro University in Semarang, Indonesia. That single-byline honesty is deliberate. Readers deserve to know exactly who is talking to them, what that person studies, and how to check his work. His profile page carries the full background, the toolkit, and the places he can be found off-site.
Follow Along
New essays land on most Fridays in the newsletter, one email and no noise. Feed readers are first-class citizens here: the RSS page lists full-text feeds for the whole site and for every category. Questions, corrections, and disagreements all route through the contact form or straight to [email protected], where corrections jump the queue as a matter of published policy.