Blogs

When Denis O'Brien attacked blogging economists during the week, I have a feeling he wasn't thinking about our regular posts about IZA/NBER working papers and developments in microeconometrics. But having said that, it is worth defending why blogging is actual something that some of us bother to do despite the potential reputational risks that can result from too rapid and exposed communication.

For me, blogging serves a good function for communicating to wider audiences including students, colleagues and people outside of research who might actually want to apply some insights coming from the academic literature. It also provides a way of people outside of academia to question what's going on in the literature. Blogs help build communities of interest around the topics being discussed and are a really useful way of keeping people up-to-date with seminars and so on in a way that is non-intrusive. We have debated this here before but I lean toward the view that blogs are starting to have a very important democratic function including in Ireland, more important than during the initial bubble where millions of them proliferated. Some blogs and related forums now like the IrishEconomy and Politics blogs are actually important components of our public sphere and may actually be directly influencing public policy. More specialist blogs like this one I think are starting to provide a model for how research groups can keep information flowing and with very rare exceptions, nothing but good has come out of this.

As Richard Tol said in the comments in the IE blog, blogging is not a substitute for academic work. It is part and parcel of an approach to the development and communication of academic ideas.