Saturday, December 31, 2011

Follow-up on the Chronicle post

My post the other day mocking the really dopey piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about heterodox economics made it very rapidly onto my top 10 all time hits list, which surprised me a bit.

It turns out that much of the traffic was generated by this thread at econjobmarketrumors. Contrary to the second poster on that thread, I did not start the thread. I have actually only ever actively promoted two of my posts: one was my 10 most influential books list, which I emailed Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution about and the other was my post on matching methods for causal inference, which I emailed Chris Blattman about. Both of those posts, as it turns out, are also on my top 10 all time hits list. Somehow active promotion seems like being a bit too involved in the blog.

I also wanted to add one other thing, which I should have included in the original post. Much of the discussion of heterodox economics in the popular media proceeds as if the entirety of economics consisted of the part of macroeconomics that studies the business cycle. This is very misleading. Most economists are not macroeconomists and many macroeconomists study issues other than the business cycle, such as growth, consumption or savings. Some clever soul ought to write about how heterodox economists deal with the rest of the subject, and the clever souls who write pieces like the one at the Chronicle ought not to mislead their readers about the division of tasks within economics.

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