economics21st.com

Save a few keystrokes…

Just to let you know, in case you haven’t noticed yet: I’ve bought the domain economics21st.com, and pointed it at my substack, so you can save yourself a few keystrokes now!

This seems like a good opportunity to look at how this affected everyone’s raw net worth¹.

Registering a new .com domain and connecting it to Substack

I used my credit card to pay two organisations:

1. IONOS (left half), to register the domain

2. Substack (right half), to connect the domain to the blog

[In case you’re wondering, I’m not being paid to promote either of these — just letting you know who I use. I moved my main domain to IONOS when my previous registrar took my money but failed to renew the domain and I lost lots of emails and time in recovering it. IONOS were extremely helpful, and they are happy to speak to you on the phone].

Registering the domain

IONOS charge £9 for the first year, and £15/year after that for registering a .com domain.

There are 3 actions involved in the transaction for registering the domain:

1. (New debt). I promise to pay Visa £9 at the end of the month.

2. (New debt). Visa promises to pay IONOS £9 (probably a bit less in reality, so Visa make a small profit) in the next few days.

3. (Service). IONOS registers the domain in my name, and lets me edit the DNS² settings so I can make the name “economics21st.com” point wherever I like (such as the Substack server).

Looking at the arrows pointing to and away from each person, we can see how everyone’s RNW changes:

Notice as usual that nothing tangible was produced or consumed, so the total of all these changes is zero. In effect, Visa simply help to transfer £9 from me to IONOS.

There will be 2 more transactions in the future as a result of the new debts:

In a few days, Visa will pay £9 to IONOS, and IONOS will write off Visa’s £9 debt to it.

And at the end of the month, I will pay Visa £9, and Visa will write off my £9 debt to it.

Connecting the domain with the blog

Substack charge a 1-off fee of $50 to use your own domain name with your substack blog. In this case, I’m using “economics21st.com” instead of the original “economics21st.substack.com”. The Substack server delivers huge numbers of blogs — the one it shows you depends on the name which you put in the address bar of your browser³.

I paid Substack to configure their server to recognise that if you’re connecting to “economics21st.com”, it shows you the contents of my blog. Substack also create a cryptographic “SSL certificate” and install it on their server, so that you can see the padlock icon when you connect to my blog, confirming that you’re really connected to the correct server.

Again there are 3 actions:

1. (New debt). I promise to pay Visa (approximately) £40 at the end of the month.

2. (New debt). Visa promises to pay Substack $50 (probably a bit less in reality, so Visa make a small profit) in the next few days.

3. (Service). Substack set up their server so that people can connect to it using the new domain “economics21st.com”.

As before, we can see how everyone’s RNW changes by looking at the arrows pointing to and away from each person:

I live in the UK, where we use pounds as currency. But Substack is based in the USA, which uses dollars as currency. The current exchange rate is about £1 for $1.25, so Visa charge me £40 in order to pay Substack $50. Again, notice that, with nothing tangible being produced or consumed, the total of all the changes is zero.

There will be 2 more transactions:

In a few days, Visa will pay $50 to Substack, and Substack will write off Visa’s $50 debt to it.

And at the end of the month, I will pay Visa £40, and Visa will write off my £40 debt to it.

Summary

economics21st.com is live!

The One Lesson gives us a simple way to understand the transactions involved in this international scenario, as well as any others.

1. Someone’s raw net worth (RNW) is what they own plus what they’re owed minus what they owe. It is a “heterogeneous” sum/difference, which just means that things of different types are added and subtracted, not monetary “values” which have been assigned to them.

2. DNS = Domain Name Server. Its main job is to translate names like “economics21st.com” to numeric IP addresses like “3.231.35.217”.

3. Specifically, it’s the “Host:” header in the HTTP request. (Don’t worry if that means nothing to you. You don’t need to know it, but it’s kind of interesting if you do).