Economics and good economics blogging

Matthew Kahn at Environmental and Urban Economics asks Do You Need a PHD to Write a Good Economics Blog?

For the last month, I’ve been pretty carefully reading many economics blogs. I’ve wondered what determines whether a site is popular and I’ve tried to learn about what blog authors consider to be a “good posting”. In my opinion, a large [number] (90%?) of the blog entries posted on Economics Roundtable require no graduate training in economics to produce. Is this surprising? Is this bad?

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In general, I am surprised by how few of the big ideas economists have generated since 1970 are reflected in the Roundtable postings. The posting rarely use incentive theory, or game theory (strategic thinking) to discuss real world issues. New empirical work is rarely discussed for helping improve our understanding of causality and what is effective policy and how we know this.

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I’ve read a post on Dan Drezner’s blog where he asked why there weren’t more top political scientists blogging. Would Roundtable be better on average if economists from the top 25 schools participated more?

Hey there, I'm an economist from a top 25 school! Appalachian State University is the 15th ranked school in the US News and World Report's Southern Masters University category. Affectionately known as AppState, ASU is a southern IVY (i.e., kudzu) league school.