LATimes covers economics bloggers:
"I don't think most people look up to nerdy academic economists as heroes," he said.
But economists who blog might be different.
Lee Beck, a 21-year-old math major who attends the University of Texas at Houston, reads a handful of economics blogs daily. Cowen's Marginal Revolution is a favorite. Cowen is "a pretty big celebrity to me," Beck said. "Of all the people alive today I could meet and have dinner with, he's one of the first couple names on the list."
Other readers have taken their interest in Cowen a step further. One saw his daughter Yana at her supermarket job and introduced himself as a Cowen fan who knew her name from the blog.
Such devotion doesn't strike fans as odd.
"I would ask one of those guys for an autograph," said Eric Husman, a 41-year-old engineer in New Mexico.
Link via one of the rock stars himself! Interestingly, while LATimes's list of econ bloggers does not include Berkeley's Brad DeLong.
3 Comments:
Marginal Revolution is engaging but I am beginning to feel that it is biased towards USA, libertarianism and not always subtle about it. Look at the posts on Nicaragua, deaths in Iraq, his praise of Gregory Clark and P.J.O'Rourke. I find Mark Thoma's site (which I got to know through your remarks) much more informative. I like some of Brad DeLong's posts but do not always understand him. CrookedTimber sometimes takes on MR and has interesting discussions. Mathew Yglesias is again diffuse like MR but has good discussions. Our own Alternative Perspective and and Fractured Earth are pretty good. This site is quite engaging and informative.
Wow..I'm not sure if I would recognize bloggers in real life...not just because of not having seen their pictures, but even with the pictures I would never think to put two and two together. x_x
Swarup: Yes, I too am not a big fan of MR's politics. I read it for discovering interesting social science research.
I agree with you on Mark Thoma's blog: it's a treasure.
Our own Madhukar Shukla's blog is a treasure too. I just wish he would post more often. As for Fractured Earth, Rajshekar has taken a break now.
Vi: I agree. The pictures you see on blogs tend to be too small and low-res. However, people like Tyler Cowen and Greg Mankiw appear in American media (particularly newspapers) so often that identifying them on the street would not really be a problem. However, identifying Cowen's daughter? That's something else, isn't it?
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