I spend most of my blog time on economic blogs.

They offer strong reviews and detailed analysis of research. The policy aspects of economics is that the quality of the research drives how economists study policy. I think the "talking heads" op ed page economists devalue real econ. If its the WSJ or NYT if they don't back up their points with data then their points are just what they like/feel.

A discussion of the same title was recently held at SwordsCrossed (http://www.swordscrossed.org/node/1258).

As an evolutionary biologist, this hurts my ego, but I have to admit that there's a strong argument that for politicians and citizens, it is more important to understand economics than it is to understand evolution.

Thank you for promoting those excellent blogs by economists.

This debate continues as academia adjusts to online publishing. Will peer-review traditional publishing come towards the relatively free spaces of the blogosphere or vice versa. The most likely and obvious solution is a compromise. Watch this space.

At least to a majority of Americans.

In the last presidential election, 21% of the polled electorate said they voted to ban gay marriage. 20% said they voted for economic issues.

That's a full 1 percent more people who care more about government imposing theocratic rule rather than caring about their own economic welfare. Something tells me that those people get their understanding of the origin of species from the same book that preaches hatred and violence towards homosexuals.

If there is such a saturation of economist blogs out there why haven't they joined blogscholar yet. Any economists with a blog please join blogscholar, a non-profit academic blog directory out of the University of London. Just join the site and submit your site to the economics category.

"All those professors chattering away about free trade and exchange rates and immigration -- to what end?"

For the end of the free exchange of ideas. It wouldn't be very controversial to say that the internet accelerated progress in biological research simply because scientists in distant locations were able to communicate with each other and discover where they were duplicating each other's work. I expect the same is true when people in any scientific discipline suddenly have a chance to talk to each other on a daily basis. In that context, I can't imagine how economic blogs could possibly NOT have a positive benefit.

I agree with the author that internet discussions are like graduate seminars, and with other posters that this can be a good way to spread information.

But the problem with graduate seminars since the 1990s has been that, due to new funding models that require huge amounts of time spent on applying for & reporting on funding, professors haven't really had time to go to them anymore. So seminars can be just the brilliant students wandering unguided around intellectual space. Being a useful intellectual isn't just about being smart; it's also about knowing a litany of attractive but ultimately false ideas people have already spent a lot of time exploring.

Where there are concerted efforts by top minds to disseminate their research through blogs, the question becomes one of moderation --- if a site is the place to be, how do you make sure it doesn't get filled up with lower-quality posts that make the time / value benefit too low for serious academics and policy makers to have time for it? Normally by moderating, but this takes time too, and we are back where we started with peer review (not a bad place to be, but a slow one.)

Meanwhile, what if science becomes like the protestant religion, where charismatics who do find it worth their time to moderate their sites and encourage participation start trouncing the people with serious advanced degrees and insight, but unpopular messages. Like the southern baptists shutting their seminaries that did biblical scholarship because they were indicating someone other than the disciples wrote the gospels, the economics that winds up in policy could be dominated by easy answers spouted by likable folks who are rewarded for applying their cleverness to the defense of politically palatable solutions with lucrative consulting and public appearances. And well-informed voters will go along with this because they have read all about the reasons on the political/intellectual blogs they are made to feel most welcome and valuable on. But then, maybe that's not much different from the situation of the last two hundred years, but using newspapers, not blogs.

As someone who follows the cultural evolution of Wikipedia, I've been amazed at the way citation has become the sword for ending revision wars. Currently it is rather indiscriminate citation (e.g. lots of links to hobby websites & vanity press political pamphlets). But if the community has gotten over the hurdle of realizing citations matter, it hopefully won't be too much harder to get to realizing that the quality of citations matters. In which case we will have a way of connecting the work of the brightest minds in the highest-quality journals to the policy -- via the good work of hobbyists and bloggers.

I think that learning about economics is one of the 3-5 most important subjects that kids and adults can learn in the world. How to work with data, using data to make decisions. It teaches how macro systems function across the world. How micro systems deal with imperfect information, actors, products, services, pricing, incentives, supply/demand. How and why actors make the judgements they do. And as a social science it deals with the fact that 10-20% of the subject has to reinvent itself every decade. The lessions and are there everyday for how and why you do what you do in society.

It sounds like Andrew has found a few Econo-Blog sites that he finds useful. I wish that he would share this information in a future post, since I don't have the time to surf this topic effectively.

I don't have the links but you can google:

'economist's view' (this is best all around, by Prof Mark Thoma)

brad delong

brad setser (current acct deficit, yuan valuation)

'beat the press' dean baker

'the borjas blog' (immigration)

dani rodrik (globalization)

econbrowser

'calculated risk' (housing)

macroblog (an optimistic view of macro conditions)

'The big picture' (economics and stock market)

'maxspeak you listen' (a little more lefty)

These are all excellent.