Economists: The New Stars of the Blogosphere

Subject: Economists: The New Stars of the Blogosphere Thu Jul 16, 2009 4:10 pm

Americans trying to understand the nail-biting financial trauma of the past several months are flocking by the millions to a surprisingly lively source of enlightenment: blogs written by economists.

Such blogs are thriving in this recession, driven by intense interest from policymakers, investors, academics and people like Zina Poletz, a Minneapolis public-relations executive who says she had little interest in economics before the financial crisis intensified last fall. “I never thought I’d be sitting up late at night reading what [Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke thinks, but now I do,” she says.

For many people, economics has never seemed so captivating, or so relevant. The enormous appetite for information and guidance right now is hardly a surprise: Even those with a basic knowledge of supply and demand have struggled to keep tabs on the global downturn.

“My [economics] professors were always saying, ‘This is the most relevant class you could ever be in,’” says Christa Avampato, a product developer in New York City with an M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. “But I think until the last 18 months I never really believed them.”

The result is a watershed moment for economics bloggers, ranging from academics to armchair economists, who are all too happy to help readers fill in the blanks—or find a place to vent their frustrations. Traffic to the top sites, such as Marginal Revolution, Freakonomics and the blogs from academics such as Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw and Brad DeLong, surged anywhere from80% to 250% from July to September 2008 as the financial crisis intensified, according to Compete.com, a Web site that measures Internet traffic. The most popular blogs can attract as many as 50,000 to 100,000 page views a day.

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The economics blogosphere “can be a rancorous place,” says Jared Walczak, a 22-year-old legislative director for a Virginia state senator and a fan of the blogs. Mr. Walczak says he prefers the blogs that instead point toward interesting research and ideas, such as Marginal Revolution, which was started by two George Mason University economics professors and examines a wide range of topics from poetry to autism to ordering at ethnic restaurants. “It’s very eclectic and always a source of something new,” he says.

Marginal Revolution is one of the best-read economics blogs, attracting more than 23 million visitors since its launch in 2003. Its success has boosted the careers of its co-founders, Tyler Cowen—the general director of GMU’s Mercatus Center, which is known as a bastion of libertarian thought—and Alex Tabarrok, a research fellow there.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203739404574288793998936838.html

Economists: The New Stars of the Blogosphere

Economists: The New Stars of the Blogosphere

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