Economist's View

32+ Years...

Thread

I hope to begin posting again soon. I needed a break.

Problem with Comments

There was a problem with comments I didn't notice until today (don't think anyone could comment). Hopefully it is fixed.

A Short Break

I should explain -- taking a few days away -- will be back soon.

Blog Note

Things have been really slow here lately -- have been traveling. Have a really long travel day today (to Dubai via London and Frankfurt), but will start posting regularly again as soon as I can.

Blog Note

Travel day today. Will post if and when I can.

Blog Note

Travel day (from cold to warm). Will post as I can.

Paul Krugman: Thoughts for the Horrified

I started blogging a few months after George Bush was reelected. I didn't feel like I has done enough before the election, so I decided to do whatever I could to try and make a difference.

When Trump was elected, I felt like I had failed, that all the effort over the last 12 years (it takes an immense amount of time each day to do this, and the opportunity cost has been high) had been for nothing. I felt like hanging it up. But I knew deep down I couldn't do that. So time to regroup, drop the complacency I fell into over time (I don't write anywhere near as much as I once did), and do what I can.

The most disappointing part of this is about my plans for the future. I have (tentatively) been thinking of retiring in two years, and cutting back considerably on blogging, writing columns, etc. The time to stop and smell the roses is near. Now those plans are in doubt. If Trump and the Republicans proceed as I think they will, it may be much longer than that before I can scale back and live with myself.

Anyway, here' Paul Krugman:

Thoughts for the Horrified, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: So what do we do now? By “we” I mean all those left, center and even right who saw Donald Trump as the worst man ever to run for president and assumed that a strong majority of our fellow citizens would agree.

I’m not talking about rethinking political strategy. There will be a time for that.... For now, however, I’m talking about personal attitude and behavior in the face of this terrible shock. ...

Unfortunately, we’re not just talking about four bad years. Tuesday’s fallout will last for decades, maybe generations.

I particularly worry about climate change..., the damage may well be irreversible.

The political damage will extend far into the future, too. The odds are that some terrible people will become Supreme Court justices. States will feel empowered to engage in even more voter suppression... At worst, we could see a slightly covert form of Jim Crow become the norm all across America.

And you have to wonder about civil liberties, too. The White House will soon be occupied by a man with obvious authoritarian instincts...

What about the short term? My own first instinct was to say that Trumponomics would quickly provoke an immediate economic crisis, but after a few hours’ reflection I decided that this was probably wrong. I’ll write more about this in the coming weeks...

So where does this leave us? What, as concerned and horrified citizens, should we do?

One natural response would be quietism, turning one’s back on politics. It’s definitely tempting... But I don’t see how you can hang on to your own self-respect unless you’re willing to stand up for the truth and fundamental American values.

Will that stand eventually succeed? No guarantees. Americans, no matter how secular, tend to think of themselves as citizens of a nation with a special divine providence, one that may take wrong turns but always finds its way back, one in which justice always prevails in the end.

Yet it doesn’t have to be true. ... Maybe America isn’t special, it’s just another republic that had its day, but is in the process of devolving into a corrupt nation ruled by strongmen.

But I’m not ready to accept that this is inevitable — because accepting it as inevitable would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The road back to what America should be is going to be longer and harder than any of us expected, and we might not make it. But we have to try.

Blog Note

Travel day. Not sure when I can post.

Women and Econ Blogs

Claudia Sahm

women and econ blogs: I enjoy reading econ blogs. ... So why are there so few female economic bloggers? ... Here are some of my hypotheses:

1. Women with opinions are not well received. I have heard this one but I am not so sure. My gateway to tweeting and blogging was commenting on Marginal Revolution. I was tolerated (very few women comment there) but it was clear that some of the other commenters did not appreciate a woman with an opinion. I was once told that I was an example of why women should not have gotten the vote, hmm. In contrast, I have felt perfectly welcome in econ-dork Twitter. ...

2. Women are busy with other forms of service. ...many economist positions do not lend themselves well to blogging. There are many women working in government as economists ... I have never seen more female macroeconomists than at the Fed and I've enjoyed getting to know other female economists in government via DCWEP. But public service and blogging can be pretty tricky. And for junior women in academia it may be even riskier to blog. I don't understand why so few senior women in academia blog. Diane Coyle is on the only I can think of ... their absence makes me think blogging is a mistake. And of course, service goes beyond work ... there's family too.

3. Women underestimate what they would contribute by blogging. Blogs, for all their interesting ideas, have a bit of egos running amok too. ... I have sat in meetings with two male economists basically yelling at each other over something unknowable ... they finish and walk away pleased with their digs and I am drained just by listening. ... It is easy to think that showmanship is a part of blogging and maybe women are less likely to enjoy that. Or the ones who do are less likeable. But really blogs are about sharing ideas and all economists have plenty of ideas. Plus it is a very flexible format ... though maybe it is harder for women to imagine themselves as econ bloggers given the current landscape? ...

As with a lot causality debates, the reason why there are few women blogging is probably a complex mix of factors. But it's nothing set in stone either. In fact, I am always happy to see other women on Twitter, blogging ... or more generally voicing their opinion on economics. There is plenty of work to go around!

Economists, Blogs, and Donald Trump

I have a new column:

Economists, Blogs, and Donald Trump: The reason I have this column can be credited to, or blamed on, George Bush.

During the presidential campaigns before the 2004 election, I was very unhappy with the coverage of Bush’s economic proposals in the press. The reporting on the claim that tax cuts would cause so much growth they would pay for themselves, and the discussion of Social Security privatization were particularly irksome, but there was a more general sense that people writing about economic issues were too easily lulled into “bothsideism” and swayed by political spin. Readers were not being informed about what economic theory and evidence says about the policies the candidates were proposing. 

In an attempt to do whatever I could to change that, I started writing letters to the local paper followed by three op-eds. Then, one day in March of 2005 I started ablog. That eventually led to this column. 

I wasn’t the only one who began using blogs to try and improve communication about economics. The number of economists with blogs has grown substantially, and it has made a difference. The press coverage of economic issues is much better than it was during the campaigns for president in 2004. It’s not perfect, there are still occasions when I want to tear my hair out in frustration, but it’s far better than it was. ...

So it’s been frustrating to see how little difference it has made in the current presidential campaign. ...

Comments

There appears to be a comment problem of some sort. I have to board a plane in a few minutes -- will try to resolve it as soon as I can.

Update: Hoping it's fixed.

'Recognizing Those Who Have Improved Our Financial Lives'

Early thanks giving to Jill Schlesinger:

Recognizing those who have improved our financial lives: ... I am often asked about which financial blogs that I use to augment the multitude of publications that I need to do my job. I am thankful for the terrific work of Bill McBride of the Calculated Risk blog. In addition to his wise insights about the housing market, Bill has a wonderful way of providing much need context to a world of economic numbers. I am also grateful for Barry Ritholtz' blog The Big Picture, with its great mix of information, humor and a healthy dose of skepticism. Although a bit wonkier, I always learn from economics professors James D. Hamilton and Menzie Chinn, who are the brains behind Econbrowser and Mark Thoma of Economist’s View. ...

Thank you!

Is Content Aggregation Harmful?

This is from the NBER (Project Syndicate, are you listening?):

Content Aggregation by Platforms: The Case of the News Media, by Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker, NBER Working Paper No. 21404, July 2015: ... In recent years, the digitization of content has led to the prominence of platforms as aggregators of content in many economically important industries, including media and Internet-based industries (Evans and Schmalensee, 2012).

These new platforms consolidate content from multiple sources into one place, thereby lowering the transactions costs of obtaining content and introducing new information to consumers. ... For these reasons, platforms have attracted considerable legal and policy attention. ...

Our results indicate that ... the traffic effect is large, as aggregators may guide users to new content. We do not find evidence of a scanning effect...

Our empirical distinction between a scanning effect where the aggregator substitutes for original content and a traffic effect where the aggregator is complementary, is useful for analyzing the potential policy implications of such business models. The fact we find evidence of a "traffic effect" even with a relatively large amount of content on an aggregator, is perhaps evidence that the "fair use" exemptions often relied on by such sites are less potentially damaging to the original copyright holder than often thought.

On the comment that the benefits outweigh the harm "even with a relatively large amount of content on an aggregator," when I post an entire article, as I did yesterday with this Vox EU piece, a surprisingly high percentage of you still click through to the original.

With video, at least in most cases, there is code available to put the video on your site. You play it and it has ads, branding, etc. I've always thought (or maybe hoped) content providers should do the same thing. Provide an embed button that allows me to duplicate an article -- it would come with ads, links to other content on their site, etc. -- on my site. Reads of the article would go way up (not from just my site, I mean if they allowed everyone to do this), and it would increase the number of people who see ads associated with their content (so they could charge more).

Comments

I've received several emails saying comments are disabled. Not sure what's up...trying to fix the problem.

Update: All comments are going to spam (even my own). I am releasing them (and will continue to do so periodically until this is fixed).

Update: I believe this is resolved.

The Death of Blogs has been Greatly Exaggerated

I have a new column:

The Death of Blogs has been Greatly Exaggerated: Are blogs dead? A few prominent bloggers who have moved on to more traditional media sites, or sites of their own creation have proclaimed that they are. That’s not surprising. Of course they believe they moved on to bigger and better things, and that their exit signals the end of one era and the beginning of another. But those of us who still blog every day – I just passed my ten-year anniversary as an economics blogger – believe that economics blogging continues to play a very important role in the public discourse.  ...

[The title of the column is different -- I did not choose it.]

Ten Years

Today is the ten-year anniversary for this blog. Ten years! It hardly seems like that long. When I started, I didn't expect much.

So far as I can recall, I haven't missed a single day in all that time. Sometimes it's just a simple post with links, etc., but there have been new posts every single day for 10 years.

My life has changed a lot in the last year and a half, and I can't promise that I won't miss a day now and then -- there will be times soon, I think, when the record may end. Ten years straight seems like enough in any case.

But for now, it continues...

Thanks to all who have stopped by over the years!

'Blog You Need to Read: Tim Duy's Fed Watch'

I can't claim to be unbiased, but fully agree with Brad DeLong:

Blog You Need to Read: Tim Duy's Fed Watch: Over at Equitable Growth As all of you surely know by now, I am a big fan of Tim Duy of the University of Oregon and his Fed Watch.

Here is a sample--ten very useful and informative takes from the past half-year or so:

• Another Kocherlakota Dissent - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• FOMC Recap - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• FOMC Meeting - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• The Labor Market Conditions Index: Use With Care - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• Is There a Wage Growth Puzzle? - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• Fisher on Wages - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• QEInfinity Not - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• Inflation Hysteria - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• Policy Induced Mediocrity? - Tim Duy's Fed Watch
• Dudley Revisits Exit Strategy - Tim Duy's Fed Watch

Always judicious, always giving a fair shake to all the currents of thought in the Federal Reserve, to the data, and to the live and serious models of how the economy works.

Read Tim Duy, and you have a sophisticated, broad, and truly balanced understanding of what the Federal Reserve is thinking, what it is doing, why it is doing it, and what the likely outcomes of its actions are. That is a package that is very hard to find anyplace else.

It still surprises me that Tim Duy does not get significantly more airplay in the general conversational mix than he does...

Is Blogging or Tweeting about Research Papers Worth It?

Via the Lindau blog:

The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it?, by Melissa Terras: Eager to find out what impact blogging and social media could have on the dissemination of her work, Melissa Terras took all of her academic research, including papers that have been available online for years, to the web and found that her audience responded with a huge leap in interest...

Just one quick note. This is what happened when one person started promoting her research through social media. If everyone does it, and there is much more competition for eyeballs, the results might differ.

How the Internet is Changing What Economists Do

I have a new column on how the internet is changing the practice of economics:

How the Internet is Changing What Economists Do

Or at least it should be.

'Round Number Bias'

Tim Taylor:

One Million Page Views and Round Number Bias: Earlier this week, this Conversable Economist blog reached 1,000,000 pageviews. ... Of course, being me, I can 't commemorate a landmark without worrying about it. Is focusing on 1,000,000 pageviews just another example of round-number bias? Are pageviews a classic example of looking at what is easily measureable, when what matters is not as easily measurable?

Round number bias is the human tendency to pay special attention to numbers that are "round" in some way. For example, in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Psychology (vol. 36, pp. 96-102) ,Michael Lynn, Sean Masaki Flynn, and Chelsea Helion ask "Do consumers prefer round prices? Evidence from pay-what-you-want decisions and self-pumped gasoline purchases." They find, for example, that at a gas station where you pump your own, 56% of sales ended in .00, and an additional 7% ended in .01--which probably means that the person tried to stop at .00 and missed. They also find evidence of round-number bias in patterns of restaurant tipping and other contexts.

Another set of examples of round number bias come from Devin Pope and Uri Simonsohn in a 2011 paper that appeared in Psychological Science (22: 1, pp. 71-79): "Round Numbers as Goals: Evidence from Baseball, SAT Takers, and the Lab." They find, for example, that if you look at the batting averages of baseball players five days before the end of the season, you will see that the distribution over .298, .299, .300, and .301 is essentially even--as one would expect it to be by chance. However, at the end of the season, the share of players who hit .300 or .301 was more than double the proportion who hit .299 or .298. What happens in those last five days? They argue that batters already hitting .300 or .301 are more likely to get a day off, or to be pinch-hit for, rather than risk dropping below the round number. Conversely, those just below .300 may get some extra at-bats, or be matched against a pitcher where they are more likely to have success. Pope and Simonsohn also find that those who take the SAT test and end up with a score just below a round number--like 990 or 1090 on what used to be a 1600-point scale--are much more likely to retake the test than those who score a round number or just above. They find no evidence that this behavior makes any difference at all in actual college admissions.

Round number bias rears its head in finance, too. In a working paper called "Round Numbers and Security Returns," Edward Johnson, Nicole Bastian Johnson, and Devin Shanthikumar desribe their results this way: "We find, for one-digit, two-digit and three-digit levels, that returns following closing prices just above a round number benchmark are significantly higher than returns following prices just below. For example, returns following “9-ending” prices, which are just below round numbers, such as $25.49, are significantly lower than returns following “1-ending” prices, such as $25.51, which are just above. Our results  hold when controlling for bid/ask bounce, and are robust for a wide collection of subsamples based on year, firm size, trading volume, exchange and institutional ownership. While the magnitude of return difference varies depending on the type of round number or the subsample, the magnitude generally amounts to between 5 and 20 basis points per day (roughly 15% to 75% annualized)."

In "Rounding of Analyst Forecasts," in the July 2005 issue of Accounting Review (80: 3, pp. 805-823), Don Herrmann and Wayne B. Thomas write: "We find that analyst forecasts of earnings per share occur in nickel intervals at a much greater frequency than do actual earnings per share. Analysts who round their earnings per share forecasts to nickel intervals exhibit characteristics of analysts that are less informed, exert less effort, and have fewer resources. Rounded forecasts are less accurate and the negative relation between rounding and forecast accuracy increases as the rounding interval goes from nickel to dime, quarter, half-dollar, and dollar intervals."

In short, the research on round-number bias strongly suggests not getting too excited about 1,000,000 in particular. There is very little reason to write this blog post now, as opposed to several months in the past or in the future. However, I hereby acknowledge my own personal round number bias and succumb to it. ...

A Change in Plans

I was supposed to go on a three week trip tomorrow to Barcelona, Naples (actually the Amalfi coast), and Rome. But, well, fate intervened and the trip was canceled.

So I decided to go to Belize for a week or so instead. Don't ask me why I chose that location, I just did -- I needed to get a way for a bit. I leave later today.

I will blog as I can, hopefully seamlessly, but we'll see.

Blogging Note

Spent the day in Albi, France and rented a car to go to painted caves (Grotte de Niaux) and a castle (Chateau de Montsegur) tomorrow (both were suggestions from the conference). I travel home the next day so -- though I don't usually do this -- limited blogging.

Every once in awhile I kind of need a bit of a break, so I decided to stay in Toulouse a few extra days. I ran out of energy a few weeks ago (as you may have noticed) and need to recharge so I can get back to it once I return to Eugene. I'll do my best until then, daily links at least somehow and short "echo" posts as usual, but I doubt I'll have time to say much myself -- we'll see how it goes (running out of energy plus travel also explains the lack of posts from me the last week or so, and I have quite a bit of travel yet to come this summer).

I'm reluctant to do this -- I find it really hard to back off -- and I'll probably end up posting more than I expect. Again, we'll see how it goes.

Thanks.

[There's a reason I haven't missed a day posting to the blog in over eight years. When I first started, I was afraid that if I missed a day new readers would bail out -- I didn't want a new reader to return the next day and and find the same posts they had already seen and conclude it wasn't a very active site -- so I made sure that didn't happen. I realize a missed day won't kill the blog at this point, but it's still important to me to keep posting every day.]

____________________

One other blogging note: I sent the first set of "whitelisted commenters" to TypePad, and they are passing them along to the service that does comment filtering for them, but I don't know how long it will take to process the list (I also sent a second list awhile ago, and will continue doing so until it this is fixed).

TypePad Comments

Good news. TypePad says they can now "whitelist" specific commenters, so when I release your comments from here on I will also send them the info they need to add you to the list. *If* this works, it should help quite a bit.

TypePad's Broken Comments

In a long response to my complaint about coments and the post recommending people avoid TypePad (actually two responses after (I reactred a bitr negatively to the first), I'm told it's a top priority, blah, blah, assured it's more than lip service, and that:

We're also working on integrating Disqus as an option. That will take a lot of testing but it's in progress.

Hoping we'll get that option soon (or the spam filter begins behaving).

Legitimate Comments Marked as Spam

I just let Typepad know that the comment situation is unacceptable. They need to allow me to approve commenters by IP so this doesn't happen, fix it themselves, or I am going to have to switch to a new blog provider. I can't take this much longer.

For now, if you are thinkig of starting a blog, I'd recommend something other than Typepad.

Mark

Stupid Spam Filter

I just realesed 150+ comments trapped in spam (many were duplicates, I tried to only post the original comment when that happened).

Apologies for getting so far behind, and for the continuing problems with the spam filter.

'The Noble and Ancient Tradition of Moron-Baiting'

Via Language Log:

I agree that the world is better off with more of what Ben Goldacre has called "The noble and ancient tradition of moron-baiting", and that the blogosphere, for all its many faults, is the best method so far invented for "[making] bluffing harder".

It's a comment on Paul Krugman's The Sloppiness Syndrome, though one other NY Times columnist is also mentioned:

David Brooks writes for the New York Times, as Prof. Krugman does, and his motivation for shockingly sloppy presentations of "facts" and theories is usually to reinforce an all-too-familiar point of view, like "boys and girls need to be educated differently", or "social roles are determined by 'patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago'", or "Western societies have an individualist mentality and Eastern societies have a collectivist mentality", or "individualism and governmentalization are rising, and morality is declining", or some combination of the above.

I'm still not fully convinced on this point. The internet may make bluffing harder, but it also makes it easier for "bullshitting (to use the correct philosophical terminology)" to spread within conservative and/or liberal circles (which are relatively isolated). But perhaps those calling bullshit are, on average, prevailing over those spreading it -- I sure hope so.

RSS Feeds in the Sidebar are Fixed

Some of the RSS feeds in the sidebar stopped working for mysterious reasons (DeLong, Krugman, Econbrowser, Calculated Risk, Free Exchange, Environmental Economics, and a few more) -- I didn't change a thing -- and several of you have emailed/left comments wondering what happened.

United decided to delay yet another flight (grrr!!!), and it gave me some unexpected time so I fixed them. For now anyway. Let me know if the feedes stop working again.

(TypePad has a limit on how many RSS feeds you can have in the sidebar, but I found a way around it -- that may be the problem, don't know.)

'In Praise of Econowonkery'

Paul Krugman:

In Praise of Econowonkery: ... I would say that in general the quality of economic discussion we’ve been having in recent years is the best I’ve ever seen. ...

Part of what he covers is

that we’re having a conversation in which issues get hashed over with a cycle time of months or even weeks, not the years characteristic of conventional academic discourse. ... events are moving fast, and the long lead times of conventional publication essentially guarantee that it will be irrelevant to current policy issues.

I've called this "real-time analysis" (this is from a much longer essay):

... Real-Time Analysis and Policy Prescriptions

Economic research is largely backward looking. After the fact – when all of the data has been collected and the revisions to the data are complete – economists examine data on, say, a financial crisis, and then figure out what caused the economy to become so sick. Once the cause has been determined, which may involve the construction of new theoretical frameworks, they tell us how to avoid it happening again, i.e. the particular set of policies that would have prevented or attenuated the damage.

But the internet and blogs are changing what we do, and to some extent we now act like emergency room physicians rather than pathologists who have the time to carefully examine data from tests, etc., determine what went wrong, and then recommend how to avoid problems in the future. When the financial crisis hit so unexpectedly, it was like a patient showed up at the emergency room very sick and in need of immediate diagnosis and care. We had to reach into our bag of macroeconomic models, choose the one that was correct for this question, and then use it to both diagnose the problems and prescribe policies to fix them. There was no time for a careful retrospective analysis that patiently determined the cause and then went to work on the potential policy responses.

That turned out to be much harder than expected. Our models and cures are not designed for that type of use. What data should we look at to make an immediate diagnosis? What tests should we conduct to give us data on what is wrong with the economy? If we aren’t sure what the cause is but immediate action is needed to save the economy from getting very sick, what is the equivalent of using broad spectrum antibiotics and other drugs to attack unknown problems? The development of blogs puts economists in real-time contact with the public, press, and policymakers, and when a crisis hits, traffic spikes as people come looking for answers.

Blogs are a start to solving the problem of real-time analysis, but we need to do a much better job than we are doing now at providing immediate answers when they are needed. If Lehman is failing and the financial sector is going down with it, or if Europe is in trouble, we need to know what to do right now, it won’t help to figure that out months from now and then publish the findings in a journal article. That means the discipline has to adjust from being backward looking pathologists with plenty of time to determine causes and cures to an emergency room mode where we can offer immediate advice. Blogs are an integral part of that process. ...

Comments

I am checking the spam filter as often as I can and releasing comments (I just released 10-15 that were held up this morning, and I released quite a few yesterday as well).

Apologies -- hoping the filter will learn when I move them out of the spam bin.

'Comments, Spam, Loyal Readers, and False Positives'

Bob Lawless at Credit Slips says what I was going to say:

Comments, Spam, Loyal Readers, and False Positives: ...

... Our hosting service, Typepad, has tools to help us deal with the spam and recently rolled out a new service that has significantly reduced the amount of comment spam... At the same time, this new service seems to be creating false positives, at least judging by a few comments I have seen from long-time readers and regular commenters asking what happened to their comment. If the spam filter screens out a comment, it never shows up in my dashboard to allow me to "un-spam" it.

If your legitimate comment disappears, I apologize for that. You might try authenticating with a Typepad account or rewording the comment slightly. The anti-spam service is supposed to be a learning algorithm and should get better over time. ...

Have blog, Will Travel: Kauffman Economic Bloggers Forum

The forum will be streamed live at www.kauffman.org/EconBloggersLiveStream from 8:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. CDT.

Webcast Schedule: Economic Bloggers Forum 2013
Tentative agenda (subject to change)

Friday, April 12 (all times listed are Central Time)

8:30 a.m. Welcome by Brad Delong, Professor of Economics U.C. Berkeley and weblogger at "Grasping Reality with Both Invisible Hands"

8:35 a.m. Keynote – Economic and Financial Weblogging and the Future (Speaker: Hal Varian; Discussant Joshua Gans; Moderator, Mayor Sly James)

9:35 a.m. Break (no Webcast)

9:50 a.m. Panel discussion – Economic and Financial Weblogging, and New Modes and Orders in Education (Speaker: Clay Shirky; Discussant Ben Wildavsky; Moderator: R. Crosby Kemper III)

10:40 a.m. Break (no Webcast)

10:55 a.m. Panel discussion – Economic and Financial Weblogging and the Future and Sustainability of Financial Journalism (Panel: Cardiff Garcia, Joe Weisenthal, Allison Schrager; Moderator: Troy Davig)

11:45 a.m. Lunch (no Webcast)

12:45 p.m Panel discussion – Economic and Financial Weblogging and the Future and Sustainability of Mainstream Journalism (Panel: Bruce Bartlett; Megan McArdle; Josh Barro; Moderator: Felix Salmon)

1:35 p.m. Break (no Webcast)

1:50 p.m. Panel discussion – Economic and Financial Weblogging, Thinktanks and Policy Advocacy, and the Public Sphere (Panel: Stan Collender; Robert Litan;  Sarah Kliff; Moderator: Corey Dillon)

2:40 p.m. Break (no Webcast)

2:55 p.m. Panel discussion – Economic and Financial Weblogging and Standard Ivy-Covered Academia (Speaker: Mark Thoma; Discussant Stephanie Kelton; Moderator: Bob Strom)

3:45 p.m. Closing remarks

Google Says Get Google Reader!

After its announcement that Google Reader will end, I was surprised to see Google urging me to get it:

Anthony Juan Bautista Wants You To Know He Has Been Banned From Comments

I don't do this often, but two days ago I decided to ban two people from comments. One, Anthony Juan Bautista, is now attempting to "tattle" on me in comments and he is also impersonating many of you in numerous attempts to get his comments through (when people are banned -- I think there are five people in total who are -- they always think it's what they say, i.e. that it's political, etc., rather than how they say it, i.e. their behavior).

When he impersonates regular commentors, he says things you surely wouldn't appreciate. I was having second thoughts about banning him -- the other person was much worse, a no-brainer ban, and I was worried I might have made a mistake in my irritation at the time -- but his behavior since, the impersonation of regular commentors in particular, has convinced me the decision to ban him was correct (this post can serve as a character reference when he is Googled). If he impersonates you and I miss it when I clean his comments out, please let me know (so far, it's been cm, bakho, ilsm, paine, Emichael, Lafayette, and DrDick).

Thanks.

Trolls Win: Rude Blog Comments Dim the Allure of Science Online

Not sure why this made me chuckle, but it did:

Trolls win: Rude blog comments dim the allure of science online, EurekAlert: The trolls are winning. Pick a story about some aspect of science, any story, scroll down to the blog comments and let the bashing begin:

• Wonder how much taxpayer cash went into this 'deep' study?
• I think you can take all these studies by pointy headed scientists, 99 percent of whom are socialists and communists, and stick them where the sun don't shine.
• Yawn. Climate change myth wackos at it again.
• This article is 100 percent propaganda crapola.
• Speaking of dolts, if you were around in the 70s, when they also had scientists, the big talk then was about the coming ice age. And don't give me any of that carbon emission bull@!$%#.

Such nasty back and forth, like it or not, is now a staple of our news diet, and in the realm of online science news, the diatribes, screeds and rants are taking a toll on the public perception of science and technology, according to a study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ...

UW-Madison science communication researcher Dominique Brossard reported the results of a study showing the tone of blog comments alone can influence the perception of risk posed by nanotechnology, the science of manipulating materials at the smallest scales. ...

While the tone of blog comments can have an impact, simple disagreement in posts can also sway perception: "Overt disagreement adds another layer. It influences the conversation," she explains.

UW-Madison Life Sciences Communication Professor Dietram Scheufele, another of the study's co-authors, notes that the Web is a primary destination for people looking for detailed information and discussion on aspects of science and technology. Because of that trend, "studies of online media are becoming increasingly important, but understanding the online information environment is particularly important for issues of science and technology."

Thanks

As I look for something to post without being, or at least appearing, too anti-social, let me say a simple thanks to all of you.

Here's  repeat from 2005:

They Held Their Noses, and Ate, by James E. McWilliams, Commentary, NY Times: No contemporary American holiday is as deeply steeped in culinary tradition as Thanksgiving. ... [It's] a feast with a narrowly proscribed list of foods - usually some combination of turkey, corn, cranberries, squash and pumpkin pie. Decorated with these dishes, the Thanksgiving table has become a secular altar upon which we worship America's pioneering character, a place to show reverence for the rugged Pilgrims who came to Plymouth in peace, sat with the Indians as equals and indulged in the New World's cornucopia with gusto. But you might call this comfort food for a comfort myth.

The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist ... Our comfort food ... was the bane of the settlers' culinary existence. Understanding this paradox requires acknowledging that there's no evidence to support the holiday's early association with food - much less foods native to North America. ... It wasn't until the mid-19th century that domestic writers began to play down Thanksgiving's religious emphasis and invest the holiday with familiar culinary values. Sarah Josepha Hale and her fellow Martha Stewarts of the day implored families to "sit down together at the feast of fat things" and raise a toast to the Thanksgiving holiday. When Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863, the cornucopia-inspired myth was, as a result of these literary efforts, in full bloom. ... [H]owever, the earthy victuals that Thanksgiving revisionists arranged on the Pilgrims' fictional table were foods that Pilgrims and their descendants would have rather avoided.

The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to have forgotten ... their Puritan forebears ... strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated in gardens and orchards. Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. ... [T]he English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing short of barbaric. ... They typically prepared fields by setting fire to the underbrush and girdling surrounding trees. Afterward, they planted corn, gourds and beans willy-nilly across charred ground, possibly throwing in fish as fertilizer. To the Indian women who tended the plants with clamshell hoes, the ecological brilliance of this arrangement was abundantly clear: the cornstalks stretched into sturdy poles for the beans to climb upon, the corn leaves fanned out to provide squash with shade, and the beans enriched the soil with extra nitrogen. But the English, blinded by tradition, never got it - they just looked on in horror. Where were the fences? The neat rows of cross-sectioned grain? The plows? ... The team of oxen? ... Why were perfectly good trees left to rot? ... And those fish! Why not salt them down and export them to Europe for a tidy profit? What was wrong with these people? The collective English answer - "everything" - honed the colonists' distaste for foods, especially corn and squash, that they quickly judged best for farm animals.

A similar culinary misunderstanding developed over meat. To be sure, the English frequently hunted for their meals. But hunting was preferably a sport. When the English farmer chased game to feed his family, he did so with pangs of shame. To resort to the hunt was, after all, indicative of agricultural failure... Thus the colonists reacted with extreme disapproval when they saw Indian men ... disappearing into the woods for weeks at a time to track down protein. Making the scene even more primitive was that the women who stayed behind ... toiling away at odd jobs that the English valiantly considered men's work. The elk, bear, raccoon, possum and indeed the wild turkeys that the men hauled back to the village were, for all these reasons, tainted goods reflective of multiple agricultural perversions.

They were also ... unavoidable. The methods that colonists condemned as agriculturally backwards ... became necessary to their survival. No matter how hard they tried, no matter how carefully they tended their crops and repaired their fences ... and furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn't allow it. The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques ... provoked severe cultural insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians." This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native American victuals ... Indeed, it wasn't until after the Revolution, when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged individualism. ...

The year after Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1863:

Underinvesting in Resilience: The Role of Automatic Stabilizers

A Romney win would have provided fertile ground for econ blogging -- there were so many polices that I passionately disagree with. But even though it makes the job here a little tougher, and not quite as fun, I'll take the outcome we got. There will still be plenty to complain about in a second Obama administration, and the top priority for me is protecting social insurance programs from the cuts that the Republicans and misguided, centrist, grand bargain types on the left would like to make.

The other thing I would like to push even though it is pretty much hopeless to expect much change is our approach to fiscal policy. In deep recessions, we need it to buttress our monetary policy efforts with fiscal policy, but as it stands discretionary fiscal policy is largely dysfunctional due to the inability of Congress to agree on how to proceed (that would be easier to understand if it was simply an honest disagreement over the underlying economics, but politics -- winning the next election -- gets in the way and obstructs the ability of fiscal policymakers to respond to economic downturns).

But while discretionary policy is generally difficult to implement, and usually suboptimal when it is, another type of policy, what are known as automatic stabilizers, did much better (much of the increase in spending during the recessions was due to social programs expanding as conditions worsened). To the extent that we can shift policy from discretionary to automatic -- spending and tax cuts that kick in automatically when economic conditions deteriorate, and reverse themselves when things improve -- we would be better off.

We will worry a lot about improving the equivalent of automatic stabilizers for natural disasters in light of events like Sandy and Katrina. For example, Michael Spence could be writing about automatic versus discretionary fiscal policy instead of preparedness for national disasters:

Underinvesting in Resilience, by Michael Spence, Commentary, Project Syndicate:  ... There are two distinct and crucial components of disaster recession preparedness. The one that understandably gets the most attention is the capacity to mount a rapid and effective response. Such a capacity will always be necessary, and few doubt its importance. When it is absent or deficient, the loss of ... livelihoods can be horrific...

The second component comprises investments [in automatic stabilizers] that minimize the expected damage to the economy. This aspect of preparedness typically receives far less attention. ...

Recessions like we have just been through are costly in both personal and economic terms, and we need to worry just as much about fixing fiscal policy -- both our preparedness to ease damage with automatic stabilizers and our ability to respond rapidly with additional fiscal policy measures -- as we do about preparing for hurricanes. We will likely think hard about ways to improve hurricane preparedness, but, unfortunately, there are few signs that politicians even understand what a disaster fiscal policy has been -- how much blame they should shoulder for the continuing unemployment problem for example. Since the first step in fixing a problem is recognizing you have one, I have little hope that any effort will be devoted to improving our ability to use fiscal policy to respond in deep recessions (there are ideological barriers as well, and while the mounting evidence that fiscal policy works ought to break those barriers down, that hasn't happened).

[See also: Putting Fiscal Policy on Autopilot, a column I wrote on this in late 2010.]

The Sound of Silence

The last comment I can find from anne is 2:46 pm (11:46 am EST) on October 29. That's the day Hurricane Sandy hit.

It seems like she's been here longer than I have. Hope to hear from her again soon.

Technorati Top 100 Blog?

This can't be right --  I don't trust the ranking -- but I can't help but be amused at being ranked ahead of CNN's Political Ticker (and just behind The Caucus at the NYT). According to the Technorati Top 100:

'Economic Research vs. the Blogosphere'

One more quick one. Acemoglu and Robinson respond to a recent post that appeared here (and posts by others too, their point three responds to my comments):

Economic Research vs. the Blogosphere: Our new working paper, co-authored with Thierry Verdier, received an unexpected amount of attention from the blogosphere — unfortunately, most of it negative. The paper can be found here, and some of the more interesting reactions are here, here and here . A fairly balanced and insightful summary of several of the comments can be found here.

We are surprised and intrigued. This is the first time, to the best of our knowledge, that one of our papers, a theoretical one at that, has become such a hot button issue. Upon reflection, we think this says not so much about the paper but about ideology and lack of understanding by many of what economic research is — or should be — about. So this gives us an opportunity to ruminate on these matters. ...[continue reading]...

'We Need More Sensible Republican Voices'

A few thoughts:

I started this blog a few months after George Bush was reelected (March 6, 2005). There was more than one motivation behind the choice to start a blog, but a key factor was the way in which liberal/progressive ideas were presented in the media prior to the election, particularly on television. The presentation of economic issues was abysmal, and the people the news shows chose to invite onto their programs were far to the left of what I thought of as the typical Democrat. More importantly, the people representing Democrats on news and talk shows were unable to articulate the economic reasoning behind many of the Democrat’s proposals and ideas. When Social Security was targeted as a socialist redistribution scheme, for example, and George Bush pushed privatization, the people speaking for Democrats were unable to explain Social Security’s role as social insurance rather than a purely redistributive scheme, and they were unable to articulate the market failures that underlie the need for the government to take an active role in these markets.

For one, as an economist, I wanted people to know that Democrats are not opposed to markets. The vast majority of us are not a bunch of socialists waiting for our chance to overthrow the system. In fact, at least from my perspective, we wanted to fix the market failures so that markets actually work in the best interests of society as a whole, not just the privileged few. We were trying to make the system work better through institutional and regulatory reform that improves markets, to come as close as we can to the ideal markets in our textbooks, not overthrow the capitalist system.

But that, and other messages such as the economic underpinnings of social insurance never got through. The people chosen by the networks to be the spokespeople for the Democratic Party were, I thought, generally far to the left -- extremists if you will -- who didn’t represent what I believed at all. I can remember watching CNN one day before the election and thinking that if I was an independent voter presented with this description of what the Democratic Party stands for, I’d be wary about signing on. It was really frustrating irritating to see this happening, and I can also remember writing Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman and telling him how jealous I was that they had a way to make their voices heard.

My response – my attempt to add my voice however small it might be – was to write several letter to the editor to the local paper. When that wasn’t enough I wrote three op-eds, then one day I started a blog. Somebody had to take the initiative, I thought, and if everyone free rides waiting for others to do it, it won’t happen. (To give you an idea of the scale of my expectations for this blog, I initially hosted all the external content – graphs, etc. – on my desktop internet server which maxed out at 10 simultaneous connections. The first time someone linked to me, it overwhelmed my PC and I had to scramble to move the content to a real server. I never expected that anyone would pay much attention to the blog, though I suppose I had hopes.)

My views have evolved since then. I’m not as much of a Clinton type deficit hawk as I was then, for example, I am somewhat more receptive to redistributive policies that go beyond correcting for the effects of market failures and unequal opportunity, and I have a lot more sympathy for the views of what I used to call extremists, especially with regard to the distorting influence of political power. When I started doing this, I was pretty naïve in many, many ways (and still am).

I suspect there are Republican economists who are having much the same reaction I had eight years ago. How, they must be wondering, did the Tea Party come to represent the Republican Party? Why do news organizations choose to only interview the extremists and ignore the more moderate, reasonable voices that actually represent our views? I thought the news media was biased in its choices back then and I can understand how Republicans must think that today. Those damn producers are choosing the loudest, most entertaining of the lot I’d tell myself, and those choices are distorting the Democratic Party’s views! (This was in addition to other biases I could see, e.g. reporting about Bush.) The only solution, as far as I could tell anyway, was for people with different views to do everything in their power to be heard.

I hope there are Republican economists (and others within the Republican Party) having the same reaction I had. The push to extremism is even more pronounced in the Republican Party, and it's far more mainstream relative to what I (at least thought) I faced. I wish these voices on the right had spoken up already, but it will probably take a loss to bring them to action. I know I couldn’t understand how anyone could lose to Bush, to Bush!!!!???, and it took a loss to get me to become more active. So I can't blame the moderate voices on the right too much for not doing more to blunt the extreme voices that now dominate the Republican Party (though, again, the Republican extremism has been more extreme). For me, the loss was the motivation I needed. With the economy in the shape it’s in, Republicans must be (and are) saying the same thing about Obama. How can anyone lose to him under these circumstances? If they lose – it’s not assured yet by any means that they will – some of the more reasonable voices may blame the influence of the Tea Party and be motivated to try to change how the world sees a typical member of the Republican Party.

I hope they do, and that they are successful. We have a mixed economy and that is not going to change. Some parts are left to the private sector, at least for the most part, and in other areas there is a strong government presence. We need a healthy, robust debate about where the lines ought to be drawn between the public and private sectors, and how best to regulate the economy when the government does intervene. We also need debates on how to conduct countercyclical fiscal policy, something Republicans have always supported in the past in one form or another, we need more sensible Republican voices when it comes to monetary policy, and we need a discussion of social insurance that doesn't have one-side calling for its annihilation. There are all sorts of questions that call for a debate at the margins rather than posturing at polar extremes, and I would welcome a healthier discussion of these issues.

Have Blog, Will Travel

Short travel day by train. Next stop: Lindau, Germany for this year's Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting dedicated to Physics.

Here's the program for the firsmorning:

09.00 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
Brian P. Schmidt: Observations, and the Standard Model of Cosmology

09.30 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
John C. Mather: Seeing Farther with New Telescopes

10.00 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
George F. Smoot: Mapping the Universe in Space and Time

11.00 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
Paul J. Crutzen: Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate in the Anthropocene

11.30
Plenary Lecture
Main Hall
Mario J. Molina
The Science and Policy of Climate Change

12.00 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
Ivar Giaever: The Strange Case of “Global Warming”

12.30 Plenary Lecture Main Hall
Hartmut Michel: Photosynthesis, Biomass, Biofuels: Conversion Efficiencies and Consequences

I'm particularly interested in the sessions on climate change.

 

'Science' without Falsification

Bryan Caplan is tired of being sneered at by "high-status academic economists":

The Curious Ethos of the Academic/Appointee, by Bryan Caplan: High-status academic economists often look down on economists who engage in blogging and punditry. Their view: If you can't "definitively prove" your claims, you should remain silent. 

At the same time, though, high-status academic economists often receive top political appointments. Part of their job is to stand behind the administration's party line. They don't merely make claims they can't definitively prove; to keep their positions, appointees have to make claims they don't even believe! Yet high-status academic economists are proud to accept these jobs - and their colleagues admire them for doing so. ...

Noah Smith has something to say about "definitive proof":

"Science" without falsification is no science, by Noah Smith: Simon Wren-Lewis notes that although plenty of new macroeconomics has been added in response to the recent crisis/depression, nothing has been thrown out...

Four years after a huge deflationary shock with no apparent shock to technology, asset-pricing papers and labor search papers and international finance papers and even some business-cycle papers continue to use models in which business cycles are driven by technology shocks. No theory seems to have been thrown out. And these are young economists writing these papers, so it's not a generational effect. ...

If smart people don't agree, it may because they are waiting for new evidence or because they don't understand each other's math. But if enough time passes and people are still having the same arguments they had a hundred years ago - as is exactly the case in macro today - then we have to conclude that very little is being accomplished in the field. The creation of new theories does not represent scientific progress until it is matched by the rejection of failed alternative theories.

The root problem here is that macroeconomics seems to have no commonly agreed-upon criteria for falsification of hypotheses. Time-series data - in other words, watching history go by and trying to pick out recurring patterns - does not seem to be persuasive enough to kill any existing theory. Nobody seems to believe in cross-country regressions. And there are basically no macro experiments. ...

So as things stand, macro is mostly a "science" without falsification. In other words, it is barely a science at all. Microeconomists know this. The educated public knows this. And that is why the prestige of the macro field is falling. The solution is for macroeconomists to A) admit their ignorance more often (see this Mankiw article and this Cochrane article for good examples of how to do this), and B) search for better ways to falsify macro theories in a convincing way.

I have a slightly different take on this. From a column last summer:

What Caused the Financial Crisis? Don’t Ask An Economist, by Mark Thoma: What caused the financial crisis that is still reverberating through the global economy? Last week’s 4th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany – a meeting that brings Nobel laureates in economics together with several hundred young economists from all over the world – illustrates how little agreement there is on the answer to this important question.

Surprisingly, the financial crisis did not receive much attention at the conference. Many of the sessions on macroeconomics and finance didn’t mention it at all, and when it was finally discussed, the reasons cited for the financial meltdown were all over the map.

It was the banks, the Fed, too much regulation, too little regulation, Fannie and Freddie, moral hazard from too-big-to-fail banks, bad and intentionally misleading accounting, irrational exuberance, faulty models, and the ratings agencies. In addition, factors I view as important contributors to the crisis, such as the conditions that allowed troublesome runs on the shadow banking system after regulators let Lehman fail, were hardly mentioned.

Macroeconomic models have not fared well in recent years – the models didn’t predict the financial crisis and gave little guidance to policymakers, and I was anxious to hear the laureates discuss what macroeconomists need to do to fix them. So I found the lack of consensus on what caused the crisis distressing. If the very best economists in the profession cannot come to anything close to agreement about why the crisis happened almost four years after the recession began, how can we possibly address the problems? ...

How can some of the best economists in the profession come to such different conclusions? A big part of the problem is that macroeconomists have not settled on a single model of the economy, and the various models often deliver very different, contradictory advice on how to solve economic problems. The basic problem is that economics is not an experimental science. We use historical data rather than experimental data, and it’s possible to construct more than one model that explains the historical data equally well. Time and more data may allow us to settle on a particular model someday – as new data arrives it may favor one model over the other – but as long as this problem is present, macroeconomists will continue to hold opposing views and give conflicting advice.

This problem is not just of concern to macroeconomists; it has contributed to the dysfunction we are seeing in Washington as well. When Republicans need to find support for policies such as deregulation, they can enlist prominent economists – Nobel laureates perhaps – to back them up. Similarly, when Democrats need support for proposals to increase regulation, they can also count noted economists in their camp. If economists were largely unified, it would be harder for differences in Congress to persist, but unfortunately such unanimity is not generally present.

This divide in the profession also increases the possibility that the public will be sold false or misleading ideas intended to promote an ideological or political agenda.  If the experts disagree, how is the public supposed to know what to believe? They often don’t have the expertise to analyze policy initiatives on their own, so they rely on experts to help them. But when the experts disagree at such a fundamental level, the public can no longer trust what it hears, and that leaves it vulnerable to people peddling all sorts of crazy ideas.

When the recession began, I had high hopes that it would help us to sort between competing macroeconomic models. As noted above, it's difficult to choose one model over another because the models do equally well at explaining the past. But this recession is so unlike any event for which there is existing data that it pushes the models into new territory that tests their explanatory power (macroeconomic data does not exist prior to 1947 in most cases, so it does not include the Great Depression). But, disappointingly, even though I believe the data point clearly toward models that emphasize the demand side rather than the supply side as the source of our problems, the crisis has not propelled us toward a particular class of models as would be expected in a data-driven, scientific discipline. Instead, the two sides have dug in their heels and the differences – many of which have been aired in public – have become larger and more contentious than ever.

Finally, on the usefulness of microeconomic models for macroeconomists -- what is known as microfoundations -- see here: The Macroeconomic Foundations of Microeconomics.

Update: See here too: Why Economists Can't Agree, another column of mine from the past, and also Simon Wren-Lewis: What microeconomists think about macroeconomics.

Have Blog, Will Travel

Just a quick note. I have a somewhat brutal travel schedule the next few days, and when all is said and done, I ought to be in Nairobi, Kenya:

IRP’s International Bloggers Take on Reproductive Health in Kenya: Twelve international bloggers have been selected to report on pressing issues of reproductive health and population in Kenya this month.

In an exciting new global initiative, the International Reporting Project (IRP) is taking a group of 12 influential bloggers from around the world to Kenya on June 17-26 for an in-depth examination of reproductive health and population issues in that East African country.

Watch the IRP website for regular updates from the bloggers, and follow them on Twitter as they recount their impressions and observations of Kenya. This is the first time in its 15-year history that the IRP is taking a group of new media journalists from different countries around the world to focus on a specific global issue. The 12 bloggers come from eight countries and represent a unique diverse set of specialties – including religion, ethics, culture, economics and gender issues in the developed world. In an intensive schedule that will take them to three different regions of Kenya, the bloggers will talk to Kenyan parents and children, health officials, rural and urban citizens and experts on gender, religion and ethics. Kenya’s population is expected to double by 2040 and the country faces major health challenges, urban migration and environmental pressures caused by this rapidly growing population. [list of participants]

They know that I am not an expert on women's reproductive health issues, though I will talk about related economic issues, but my main focus will be on economic problems in Kenya (I already have around 10 background posts set to go). And no, you aren't the first person to make an Obama joke.

After that, I'm going to this year's Nobel meetings in Lindau, Germany (the meetings bring Nobel laureates together with 500-600 graduate students from around the world). I'll stop over in Zurich for three days first, but since I was going through Zurich anyway on the way back from Kenya, I figured why not go to Lindau too -- it isn't very far away. I went last year when the topic was economics, but this year the Nobel winners are from chemistry and physics. Since it isn't economics I was surprised to be invited, and had to be accredited as press to get in (ha, I was), but there are issues related to economics, e.g. global warming that I want to cover. But mostly I'm looking forward to hearing talks on something other than economics. It will be a nice break, and for the most part I have no idea what I'll be hearing (or writing about).

Then, home for 4 days and off to Boston for an NBER meeting, and some other stuff. Finally home in late July.

I am going to do my best to keep up with the blog. I have at least two posts already loaded for each day of the time I'll be in Kenya, we have been promised internet access daily and some blogging time (though nothing like usual -- withdrawals!), and I have an unlocked iPhone that I hope to load with a sim chip and tons of prepaid data (from Safaricom). We'll see how that goes, but if it works I can (fingers crossed) tether to my computer and have fairly good internet access. But I have no idea what's ahead, and I hope you will understand if I am not able to keep up with links in particular on the usual, regular schedule. I'll try, but realistically it will be hard.

I never would have guessed that an economics blog would bring so much travel.

On Moving to Forbes, or Not

Modeled Behavior has moved to Forbes, so I guess I should say that I have a blog there too. But I am not moving the blog, and no content will appear on the Forbes site that doesn't also appear here. My plan is to repost a small subset of the things that are posted at this blog each month, and nothing more (they are fully aware of my plans).

I have had many offers to move the blog over the years, and the first few were tempting (I think the Big Think was the first). However, though one should never say never, it's not moving. It took years of long, hard days to build this up to whatever meager status it might have attained (I try not to fool myself about how much influence it actually has), and I am not going to put that at risk by moving it somewhere else.

I could probably make a bit of money by moving, and I could also make quite a bit simply by pushing traffic to the Forbes blog. So if you want to show up there, interact in the comments thread, whatever, great. I'll make the most by far if you return a second time. But I am not going to do anything to encourage such behavior.

(On other outlets -- I don't make a dime more or less based upon traffic for my Fiscal Times columns, but they ask me not to reprint the columns on my blog and I honor that -- so not printing them here, except with a lag for the ones I think you'll be interested in, has nothing to do with making money for myself. I do get paid based upon traffic to the CBS stories I write, though not that much, and they have never protested when I reprint them here -- they have a huge traffic base to draw from already. So I try to dual post CBS stories whenever I think the story will be of interest. There are times when I don't post the whole story, just the title and a link, but that's usually when I write about something the editors suggest rather than something of my own choice, and I don't think there will be a lot of interest here.)

More generally, I could probably make a bit of spending money each month by placing ads on my blog. But I haven't done that, and I have no plans to do so. Why? Several reasons. For one, the state of Oregon pays me to educate the public (the education mission does not end with students, it's much more general than that, something too few professors understand). So I already get paid to do this. I suppose I should try to make enough to cover blog hosting fees, all the magazine and newspaper subscriptions I've added, and so on -- to at least break even -- but I haven't done that (and there are plenty of other perks, e.g. I'll be traveling to Kenya in a couple of weeks for a 10-day visit to report on economic conditions, we'll travel to quite a few areas of the country, more on this soon, and then on to this year's Nobel meetings in Lindau, Germany for a week all because of the blog -- and the costs are mostly covered by others so I have nothing to complain about).

But the fact that I am already paid to educate the public, and get credit from the Department and University for doing so, is not the biggest reason for the no-ads approach. Economists talk about incentives and how they affect behavior, and ads push me in directions I'd rather not go. As soon as I start trying to maximize monetary gains rather than maximizing education, it changes the posts  -- the incentives are not well aligned. I become shriller, I find myself tempted by things that will attract lots of eyeballs even if they aren't as solid as they might be, and so on. It changes the posts in ways I don't want them to change, so it's best that I leave that temptation lying on the table (though I am far from perfect). Brad DeLong told me something important when I started -- don't write to your sitemeter. Check it once a week if you must (he suggested Saturday), but don't get trapped into writing to the ebb and flow of traffic or it will drive you nuts. Instead, write what you know best, that's what people want to read. It was great advice, at least for me. I follow inbound traffic closely -- where people are coming from -- but I haven't looked at daily traffic numbers for several years. I still have pretty good idea of what they are, but it's a bit vague and that is best for me.

Since I'm at this, one more thing. This blog has no color, it's blue and white mostly, there's a ton of wasted space in the header, etc., and every so often I think I should do a big redesign. However, I don't because I'm worried about changing from a somewhat colorless, dumpy looking blog would change its identity. I want it to look like what it is, a professor with a blog who is trying to help people understand economics and policy. It's not intended as a flashy, commercial, money-making device and giving it that look may rebrand it in a way that is harmful. So I haven't done much to add color and flare to the design (though I am still thinking I ought to try to make a few changes if I can ever find the time, but it's working as it is, pretty much, so why change?).

Finally, the blog at Forbes has been ready for a few days, but I haven't posted anything there yet (here's the address: http://blogs.forbes.com/markthoma/ ). I suppose I should let you know when I do post something, and if you want to click through and take a look, great. If not, you won't miss a thing. The reason I said yes is very simple to explain -- I saw it as a chance to extend the reach of the blog to more people. That's why I am only interested in reprinting content from here (and also why I allow the rss feed to be used freely by SeekingAlpha and RGE type aggregators). It allows me to potentially reach a few more people, and not necessarily be preaching to the already converted, which is important, without changing anything that I do here. The last thing I want to do is to make a move that might undermine Economist's View in any way whatsoever, and I hope this approach will meet that non-negotiable condition.

Sending the Wrong Message

I'm not sure I see the connection, but when you blog they ask you to be in the course catalog:

I really wish I'd brought a smaller computer along when they shot the picture. That thing is huge. If the message is supposed to be "look how connected we are here at the UO," that computer sends the opposite message.

Economics Bloggers Forum 2012

Friday, March 30, the Kauffman Foundation is hosting the fourth annual Economics Bloggers Forum in Kansas City, MO. Check back here at growthology.org for a live stream of the event starting around 8:30 AM. There will be presentations from some of your favorite bloggers. An agenda follows below. [agenda]

Topics That Are Sure To Attract Lots of Comments

Here are 20 that come to mind:

Free trade is good.

Economics is a science.

Climate change is real and it's caused by humans.

The Fed deserves a pat on the back.

Immigration is good.

Reagan and Bush were right all along.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya.

Libertarians.

Social Security.

Trade with China benefits low income households.

There's no need to worry about the national debt.

Unions help.

Healthcare is better in Europe.

Bike lanes impede the free movement of cars.

Sweatshops are better than nothing.

Nobody could have predicted the bubble.

Tax cuts are the answer to almost everything.

Gold is not the answer to anything.

We need big banks.

The rich deserve their incomes.

"And There, Lurking Among Dozens of Well-Intentioned Opinions, is a Troll"

Comments on this, anonymous or otherwise?:

Where Anonymity Breeds Contempt, by Julie Zhou, Commentary, NY Times: There you are, peacefully reading an article or watching a video on the Internet. You finish, find it thought-provoking, and scroll down to the comments section to see what other people thought. And there, lurking among dozens of well-intentioned opinions, is a troll. ...

Trolling, defined as the act of posting inflammatory, derogatory or provocative messages in public forums, is a problem as old as the Internet itself, although its roots go much farther back. Even in the fourth century B.C., Plato touched upon the subject of anonymity and morality in his parable of the ring of Gyges.

That mythical ring gave its owner the power of invisibility, and Plato observed that even a habitually just man who possessed such a ring would become a thief, knowing that he couldn’t be caught. Morality, Plato argues, comes from full disclosure; without accountability for our actions we would all behave unjustly.

This certainly seems to be true for the anonymous trolls today. ...

Some may argue that denying Internet users the ability to post anonymously is a breach of their privacy and freedom of expression. But until the age of the Internet, anonymity was a rare thing. When someone spoke in public, his audience would naturally be able to see who was talking. ...

Content providers, stop allowing anonymous comments. ... In slowly lifting the veil of anonymity, perhaps we can see the troll not as the frightening monster of lore, but as what we all really are: human.