{"id":4389,"date":"2018-06-14T21:54:57","date_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:54:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/?p=4389"},"modified":"2018-06-14T21:54:57","modified_gmt":"2018-06-14T19:54:57","slug":"stock-and-flow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2018\/06\/14\/stock-and-flow\/","title":{"rendered":"Stock and flow"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about a concept from economics called <i>stock and flow<\/i> recently. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinsloan.com\">Robin Sloan<\/a> wrote a piece about it  a few years ago:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/snarkmarket.com\/2010\/4890\">\n<ul>\n<li>Flow is the feed. It\u2019s the posts and the tweets. It\u2019s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.<\/li>\n<li>Stock is the durable stuff. It\u2019s the content you produce that\u2019s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It\u2019s what people discover via search. It\u2019s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.<\/li>\n<p>Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons\u2014but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can\u2019t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you\u2019ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I\u2019ve got nothing here.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>(I came across this when Merlin Mann got on the topic of why (and <em>whether<\/em>) kids these days obsess over small things (like backpacks, or pens) much more than people of his (and my) generation do, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.relay.fm\/rd\/78\">episode 78 of Reconcilable Differences<\/a>. He carried the discussion over into the next episode of the <a href=\"http:\/\/dobyfriday.com\/80\">Do By Friday podcast<\/a> where he talked about it with his much younger co-hosts Alex Cox and Max Temkin.)<\/p>\n<p>The stock and flow concept pops up in all kinds of contexts. The one that struck me recently was <em>personal reputation<\/em>: to what extent it&#8217;s bankable, and how it evaporates over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about a concept from economics called stock and flow recently. Robin Sloan wrote a piece about it a few years ago: Flow is the feed. It\u2019s the posts and the tweets. It\u2019s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It\u2019s &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2018\/06\/14\/stock-and-flow\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Stock and flow&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4390,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4389\/revisions\/4390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}