Does economic blogging matter?? Part one
Angry Bear was started by its namesake in the latter part of 2003, and continued publishing through the editorial efforts of Mike Kimel and Dan Crawford over the last six years (see About page).
Mark Thoma at Economist View approaches the role of econblogs through pointing to the disconnect between academics and public use of the language of economics in an article published by Academia and the Public Sphere titled New Forms of Communication and the Public Mission of Economics: Overcoming the Great Disconnect:
Fortunately, however, the “Great Disconnect”[3] with the non-academic community is being reversed with the development of new information technology. Economics blogs in particular have played a key role in turning things around.
Matt Stoller at Naked Capitalism suggests:
But something odd happened in 2008, during and in the wake of the crisis. Capitol Hill staffers and members of both parties began looking for expertise on how finance actually worked. And they began reading financial blogs. Lobbyists just didn’t or couldn’t help them understand how to deal with the massive systemic failures; they knew in some sense that the information they were getting was rigged. They just didn’t know how. The financial blogs began to tell them.
Over the course of the next few years, the financial blogs became a new alternative system which delivered one of the most valuable commodities that previously had been monopolized by financial lobbyists and institutions like the Fed – credible information. That’s why there was an actual debate during Dodd-Frank over reining in the size of banking institutions, and auditing the Fed. Instead of second order industry shills distributing information they have been fed by the PR departments of big banks, communities of end-users of finance began to talk directly to lawmakers through mediated forums on the internet.
Matt Stoller said something nice about me on a list-serv a couple weeks ago and Dan Crawford gave me a platform for my Social Security work in 2008 and Mark Thoma was unusually tolerant for this amateur when he first launched Economists View, even (mistakenly) deferring to my opinions on productivity that in truth I mostly lifted from Baker and Rosser.
But that already gets us back before Stoller’s 2008 and even Thoma. And there are two missing names between the eponymous Angry Bear and Kimel (at least I don’t think KM was AB, though I missed both). But whatever you think about the role of AB the Ur Site of Econoblogging, barely rivaled by Billmon and Atrios (which latter not known as the PhD economist he turned out to be) was clearly MaxSpeak and it’s Siteowner Max Sawicky (MaxSpeak You Listen). Max for professional reasons had to shelve MaxSpeak but without its successor EconoSpeak and interim bloggers Barkley Rosser and PGL (in my understanding a Siteowner of this place for a time) and, well me, and a little more indirectly Brad and Thoma, we would not have had the pieces picked up by Stoller.
Just as we had the DFHs picking up on the debacle that was Iraq prior to March 2003, we had Econobloggers fostering the data oriented, fuck the Econ 101 theory, commenters back when even PGL was a glimmer in the Bear’s Eye. And most of those econoblog roads ran through MaxSpeak. Certainly Max S was the first economist that actually took me seriously.
Of course some would place that fact somewhere between faint praise and opprobrium, but I will be forever grateful. That is while some people might not get validation in a comment “Man this guy might actually have read the data tables of the Trustees Report!” back in 2003 I took what I could get.
Hi Bruce:
Not to form a mutual admiration society; but, your SS words and answer to me at Economists View on SS when I was touting Diamond quickly filled in the holes I knew existed from reading Brookings on the topic. I do miss your posting here and would hope you would do more at this site.
Run–I’m glad you don’t want to form a mutual admiration society of any kind, but Bruce won’t listen to me. So, maybe he’ll listen to you. Me, I always learn something here and you have both taught me a lot. Thanks, y’all. NancyO
“Over the course of the next few years, the financial blogs became a new alternative system which delivered one of the most valuable commodities that previously had been monopolized by financial lobbyists and institutions like the Fed – credible information. That’s why there was an actual debate during Dodd-Frank over reining in the size of banking institutions, and auditing the Fed. Instead of second order industry shills distributing information they have been fed by the PR departments of big banks, communities of end-users of finance began to talk directly to lawmakers through mediated forums on the internet.”
Hear, hear!
Now if only something comperable could happen in the legal profession, with the courts.
“Over the course of the next few years, the financial blogs became a new alternative system which delivered one of the most valuable commodities that previously had been monopolized by financial lobbyists and institutions like the Fed – credible information. That’s why there was an actual debate during Dodd-Frank over reining in the size of banking institutions, and auditing the Fed. Instead of second order industry shills distributing information they have been fed by the PR departments of big banks, communities of end-users of finance began to talk directly to lawmakers through mediated forums on the internet.”
Hear, hear!
Now if only something comparable could happen in the legal profession, with the courts.
Bruce,
For the record, I am not Angry Bear. I had some correspondence with Angry Bear back in 2006 and 2007, online, and to the best of my knowledge I’m not schizophrenic. I could be wrong but I believe that AB was/is either a professor of economics
Bruce,
For the record, I am not Angry Bear. I started out as a commenter on this blog (I think in 2005 or so) when the regular posters were AB, Kash, PGL and (occasionally still) Calculated Risk. I had my first post in about 2006. I had some very, very irregularly occurring correspondence with AB around 2006, give or take a year.
Also for the record, I do not know who AB was. As I recall, he (I’m pretty sure AB is a
Bruce,
For the record, I am not Angry Bear. I started out as a commenter on this blog (I think in 2005 or so) when the regular posters were AB, Kash, PGL and (occasionally still) Calculated Risk. I had my first post in about 2006. I had some very, very irregularly occurring correspondence with AB around 2006, give or take a year.
Also for the record, I do not know who AB was. As I recall, he (I’m pretty sure AB is a male) used a AngryBear@one of the generic accounts as an address. I did, however, get the impression that he was a professor, but not a full-time prof. I’d say he was an adjunct but with a regular full-time job that was very time intensive.
I second your opinion of Max Sawicky. First rate stuff. But to me Sawicky has an obvious successor, in my opinion, though they overlapped for a long time. Something about Dean Baker’s writing always reminds me of the old Maxspeak.
Dan,
I would also have included PGL. To follow-up Bruce’s comment, PGL single-handedly kept this blog alive for much of 2006. By then, AB was not posting at all, Kash was down to very irregular posts, and CR had moved on to his own blog. PGL somehow produced at least one, often two high quality posts a day, usually including graphs and/or a look at the data. He could be snarky, but I can’t understand how he never become a “big name” in the econ blogosphere.
PGLs weakness was one I share-he allowed himself to be baited. And like a medieval bear in the bear pit often lashed out in true Angry Bear form.
The totally unlamented PRS/Patrick R Sullivan/Roland Patrick was a true prick. In the literal sense of ‘prick ribs with a stick’. And within the confinesofthat prickish role good at what he did even as he was able to maintain that “Who me?” shtick. And even though some of us tried to pitch in with pushback on PRS, in the end it seemed to wear PGL down to the point that giving up the keys to you may well have been a relief.
As to the Dean vs Max question, I would suggest that Dean was earlier to the fight but later to the particular field of battle that became the Econoblogosphere. That is Beat the Press and earlier CEPR based web efforts were never as bloggy as MaxSpeak and Dean neither then or now as dialed into popular culture as Max. For example the odds of checking into Dean’s blog and finding a ‘Friday Night Video Interlude’ are vanishingly small. And while Dean has a wicked sense of humor it is not like you would ever apply the label ‘slapstick’ to him. Where Max was always ready to push boundaries and was frankly hip in a way a little foreign to Dean. Certainly there was a give and take/parry and thrust at MaxSpeak that you just don’t see at BTP.
Dean was officially on Maxspeak for a period of time, although he had taken off for BtP prior to Max folding up the Maxspeak shop. I think the only people from Maxspeak who survived onto Econospeak were me and Sandwichman, who went off on his own for awhile, but seems to have returned. There is a much bigger group at Econospeak than at Maxspeak, although some rarely post, and none of us have the biting wit and hip coolness of Max.
Bruce,
As to Patrick R Sullivan who I am glad is not here any more… not sure if he’s been there a while, or just starting up again, but I recently was reading a Scott Sumner post which had been linked to from somewhere (I don’t understand why the libertarian econ folks love his stuff… some of it, it seems to me, requires a level of, well, money delusion that can’t be all that common) and stumbled on a comment by someone using Sullivan’s handle.
You may recall the very time consuming process by which I got rid of him. I started keeping track of all his comments. Then as new ones appeared I would quote his earlier comments contradicting what he had just written. And I took his comments seriously, forcing him to move them to the next step and the next step, and thus reach a conclusion. He never seemed to like the conclusions that resulted. Nor did he like the fact that it was pointed out over and over that he was contradicting himself. Eventually he left.
I hope we don’t get another infestation.
Barkley and Bruce,
Y’all are right about the coolness factor that Max brought to the table.
I think part of the problem, for lack of a better term, is that the internet has since growed up so to speak. Max started at a time when it wasn’t assumed that everything you wrote could be used against you in the real world.
Things have changed. I thought long and hard about killing my nom de plume which I did as a result of publishing Presimetrics. My publisher and agent wanted a real person, not “cactus” on the cover. (For all the book sold we might as well have kept cactus.) I can tell you that I am a lot more leary about what I write than cactus ever was.
I believe Dean B was always in a more public place than Max S ever was, so that perhaps also contributed to Dean’s sticking a bit closer to boundaries.
This gap between theory and the masses can easily be explained by the economists’ confusion, not a stupid public. There’s a simple video that will convince anyone that they don’t understand indifference curves let alone a CES utility function. Good thing this guy has discovered an equation that explains more than you might imagine. Quantity, quality, variety and convenience. This was done by a former PhD student at the University of Rochester in its heyday.
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