I note that Brad Setser has announced that he will no longer be blogging. This is not due to disillusionment with blogging, but his taking a job with the National Economic Council. Nevertheless, this is a loss as he has had the best coverage of a variety of international financial issues, especially regarding reserve balances and China, since he started initially five years ago while still working with Nouriel Roubini. He will be missed.
Another that I suspect may be a disillusionment has been the lack of any postings since June 18 at the high quality http://rodrik.typepad.com, where he has at times in the past questioned whether blogging is a good use of time for a top flight academic economist. Perhaps he has decided not for himself, although without getting around to telling all of us, or maybe he is just on vacation or very busy.
3 comments:
I miss Max.
One problem at Dani Rodrik's blog is the amount of spam in the comments. Anyway he wrote a
nice article recently (not on his blog)
Ostensibly it is about Bernanke's reappointment but he exposes a good deal of finance propaganda.
Ironic that he calls for the Anti-Greenspan in an Indian magazine. India did in fact have an Anti Greenspan in charge of its Central Bank (Y.V. Reddy) who successfully moderated a housing bubble and prevented a contagion. NYT had the story
Top flight economists blogging certainly has substantial positive externalities. For one thing the hollowness of much of mainstream (Chicago-MIT) macro has been exposed to the non specialist.
The educated non-specialist is likely to be more sceptical of economists' arguments in the future.
Is blogging good for an economist himself/herself?
Mikhail Tal, a former world chess champion regularly used to interact with novices. This, he claimed, forced him to think about the basics - which was a good thing. Richard Feynman had a similar theory on the absence of interaction with novices (students) being responsible for the lack of creative output from the brilliant minds at the IAS (Princeton).
This is not an all or none question. It is about what happens on the margin. The previous statement was probably superfluous.
We all miss Max.
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