New Economist

I’m back

For various reasons I have been unable to blog for almost three years. But now I'm back.

It would be an understatement to say I have missed a lot. Not only the Great Recession and the not-so-great recovery, but all the fun and games in the Eurozone as well. Regulators are flexing their muscles, central banks have gone all 'unconventional' on us, European politicians are still struggling to find a lasting solution to their problems, American politics is as polarised as it's ever been, Japan is finally showing signs of recovering from its earthquake and tsunami, and China looks like it might just pull off a soft landing. Interesting times.

Economics, meanwhile, is in a right old mess. Like most of my economist colleagues I missed the warning signs, so owe you all a mea culpa. As a profession we have a lot to be humble about. It's clearly time to rethink many of the assumptions, models and verities that we once held to be true.

I don't have all the right answers, but I hope to pose some of the right questions over coming weeks and months, contributing in my own small way to the Great Economic Rethink. Along with more regular features and commentary, of course.

A word of thanks to the master econobloggers (Mark Thoma, Tyler Cowen, Brad Delong et al) and countless others who have written so many great posts in recent years. Particularly gratifying has been the number of leading academic economists who have joined the fray. Welcome!

When I get the time I will also update my blogroll, clean up the thousands of spam comments on the site, and perform other necessary site housekeeping.

Stay tuned.

Back again

The very welcome return of Dave Altig's Macroblog last week has prompted me to consider posting again too.

Apologies for the protracted absence. My non-virtual life has been rather hectic in recent months. Now that things have settled down a little, I hope to return to semi-regular postings again.

It's good to be back.

New econoblogs

The Bayesian Heresy has alerted me to some new econoblogs of note, which I have added to my blogroll. Most are by academic economists:

* The visible hand in economics blog, written by several New Zealand economists, has as its mission: Exploring government and society’s role in economics

* Modeled Behavior is "a stylized foray in to the world of highly fashionable ideas" by Karl Smith, a "wet behind the ears" Professor of Economics and Government at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

* Twenty-Cent Paradigms is "a mostly macro- and international economics weblog for students (and anyone else!)" by Bill C, "an assistant professor of economics at Miami University". This appears to be William Craighead

* Macro and Other Market Musings is by David Beckworth, an assistant professor of economics at Texas State University

* Economics aka Constant Dream, is "just another blog tagging resources for economics students"

Perhaps the dam has now broken on academic economists blogging? If so, one can thank the arrival of leading economists on the scene - Greg Mankiw, Dani Rodrik and George Borjas to name just three - in making such parctices more acceptable.

Econoblogger navel gazing

There are few things more tedious than bloggers writing about blogging. So apologies for the navel gazing. I just wanted to note, for those who may find it of interest, the following recent posts:

* The Bayesian Heresy blog has posted its Economics Blog Awards 2008

* Aaron Schiff at 26econ.com has conducted a survey of more than one hundred econobloggers, and summarised the results

For some reason I missed his email, so I'd better get a belated response off to him!

The number of econobloggers has grown like topsy over the past two years. There are now more than 200 of them. Two useful econoblog rankings and directories to sort through the maze are:

* Aaron Schiff's Economics Blog Directory & Ranking, which uses Technorati rankings

* Brain Gongol's Traffic Rankings for Business and Economics Websites, which uses publicly-available traffic logs

If you can understand this blog you must be a genius

I had always assumed that the New Economist was a fairly readable weblog. An online readability test suggests otherwise, gving it a 'genius' rating. (Hat tip: Christine Chen at FP's Passport blog)

So how do other popular econoblogs compare? Many are almost as unreadable as mine: try Dani Rodrick (college postgrad), Greg Mankiw (college undergrad), the Economist's Free Exchange (college postgrad) and George Borjas (college postgrad) for starters.

But many econobloggers' writing is more accessible. Alex and Tyler at Marginal Revolution, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Brad Setser, Andrew Leigh, Dean Baker, Angry Bear, Newmark's Door, Tim Harford's FT blog and Megan McArdle's blog at The Atlantic were all assessed as having a high school reading level, while William Polley's blog was at junior high school readability.

And the only other blogs writing at genius-level I could find? John Quiggin and the Becker-Posner blog. I'm honoured to be in such company, though I have neither a beard nor a Nobel prize.

But maybe I'm just too obscure and high-falutin? Should I de-fog my posts? Feedback welcome.

In praise of Alfredo Perez

One of the non-economic weblog's I used to check regularly was the Political Theory Daily Review. Hardly an inspiring name, to be sure - but in fact it was an intellectual treasure trove of daily finds, ranging far wider than the name might suggest. Book reviews, interviews, academic papers, controversies big and small. Richer, more eclectic, more up-to-date and more lively than the better known Arts & Letters Daily.

The blog is no more, but its author, the hyperactive Alfredo Perez, now posts his daily gleanings on the front page of the journal BookForum. The main difference is that they are now grouped thematically. Here is an example of a recent post:

The story of measurement

A review of The Story of Measurement by Andrew Robinson. The first chapter from Benjamin Franklin's Numbers: An Unsung Mathematical Odyssey by Paul C. Pasles. A review of Perfect Figures: The Lore of Numbers by Bunny Crumpacker. Good stories, good math: Young children who show sophisticated story-telling skills go on to demonstrate greater mathematical ability. Alexis Lemaire can calculate the 13th root of a 200-digit number in just over a minute. In fact, he could be the greatest "mathlete" ever, but why does he want to spend four hours a day practising, and what's so special about 37? A review of Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres. A video that's worth a million words: Award-winning video reveals the simplicity and beauty of an abstract mathematical tool.

The editors are to be congratulated for hosting such a great public service. And thanks to Alfredo, now approaching his fifth year of daily posts, for an astounding and sustained achievement.

New econobloggers: Mike and Megan

Two new econoblogs started last month. One is by Mike Ward at the University of Texas: Unintended Consequences. The subtitle, 'research findings from economics that you may not have expected' explains the aim. Mike elaborates in his first post:

The goal of this blog is to try to disseminate interesting research findings from economics that may be counter intuitive. Most of these will be summarizing findings by other researchers. Others will represent work I, and my colleagues are working on. And some will be my musings on what economic theory predicts is likely to happen due to a policy proposal or news item. I will try to go beyond the direct effects of the topic under investigation and look and the secondary, and likely unintended, effects.

And that's what he has done, with daily posts covering a wide range of fascinating topics.

The other new blog is by Megan McArdle, and hosted by The Atlantic magazine. Megan used to blog at The Economists's Free Exchange. And her alter ego Jane Galt is one of the very first econobloggers, with her Asymmetrical Information blog going way back. The 'About' section says:

Megan McArdle was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra dry skim milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster recovery firms at Ground Zero . . . all before the age of thirty.

She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism.

...Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington DC, where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Megan's postings on her new blog are both prolific and provocative. I hope she's enjoying life in Washington.

Top 25 econoblogs on del.icio.us

For what it's worth, a ranking from KNZN of the top 25 economics blogs on Del.icio.us:

			number
Rank			of saves
1		Freakonomics	3152
2		Marginal Revloution	1132
3		The Big Picture	890
4		The Becker-Posner Blog	707
5		Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal	644
6		Greg Mankiw's Blog	570
7		Calculated Risk	296
8		Economist's View	292
9		EconLog	273
10		Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis	259
11		Econbrowser	249
12		Cafe Hayek	228
13		Daniel Drezner	226
14		Asymmetrical Information	205
15		New Economist	189
16		Nouriel Roubini's Blog	189
17		Environmental Economics	156
18		Tim Harford	136
19		Free Exchange at Economist.com	132
20		Angry Bear	129
21		Knowledge Problem	120
22		The Sports Economist	111
23		Oligopoly Watch	110
24		macroblog	107
25		Dani Rodrik's weblog	106

This information is provided with no warranty. The original list from which I worked was created by searching on "tag:economics tag:blog" in del.icio.us. For me to consider a site an economics blog, it generally had to have at least one URL bookmarked with "economics" as one of the top two tags and "blog" as one of the top four, and I eliminated some sites just because they didn't look like blogs to me. I tried to combine the number of saves for multiple URLs pointing to the same site, but there were undoubtedly some that I missed, and the decision as to what constitutes "pointing to the same site" was a subjective one. (I also ignored bookmarks pointing to particular posts within a blog.)

Would Orwell have been a blogger?

Robert McCrum, literary editor at The Observer, asks a good question: Would Orwell have been a blogger? He thinks the great essayist would be appalled by the writing, but applaud the democracy of the web. An excerpt:

Now just in its second decade, the blogosphere is at once wonderful and horrible. For the global community, fumbling towards some common ground, the opportunity it affords for extraordinary cross-cultural interaction is liberating and unprecedented.

...Yet the democracy of the web is in danger of becoming a cacophonous nightmare. For every carefully crafted, thoughtful expression of opinion, there are a score of half-baked rants: ignorant, bilious, semi-literate and depressing.

...There's another thing that Orwell the great freelance would have been quick to identify: in the blogosphere, no one gets properly paid; its irresponsibility is proportionate to its remoteness from the cash nexus. Worse, the blogosphere, to which all journalists are now professionally committed, not only challenges the old infrastructure of print, but it also sponsors a new prolixity.

From the Orwellian point of view, it is the violence the internet does to the English language as much as its challenge to the journalistic infrastructure that is the biggest anxiety.

New European portal: VoxEU

Good news for those on this side of the pond - about two dozen leading European economists have decided to set up their own 'policy portal' group blog: VoxEU.org The organisers explain:

VoxEU.org is a policy portal set up by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (www.CEPR.org) in conjunction with a consortium of national sites, including the Italian site LaVoce (which provided inspiration for the idea and help from the start, www.LaVoce.info), the French site Telos (www.telos-eu.com), and the Spanish site Sociedad Abierta.

Vox aims to promote research-based policy analysis and commentary by leading scholars. The intended audience is economists in governments, international organisations, academia and the private sector as well as journalists specializing in economics, finance and business.

Although it has only been up-and-running for a few weeks, there are already a dozen or so new posts and about two dozen older pieces (often translations).  Here's a sample:

* Should Europe care about global imbalances? by Philip Lane and Gian Maria Milesi-Ferretti

* Migration and welfare, byTito Boeri

* The US-Europe income gap: Is it for real? Alberto Alesina, Guido Tabellini

* The fuss about foreign exchange reserves accumulation, by Charles Wyplosz

* Is enlargement unlimited? by Richard Baldwin

This is a very welcome initiative. Thanks CEPR!