Environmental Economics

Top 6 economics blogs?

Or something else?

... DeLong, Krugman, Econbrowser, Calculated Risk, Free Exchange, Environmental Economics, and a few more ...

via economistsview.typepad.com

Actually, it is something else. Here is what Mark Thoma said about these blogs:

Some of the RSS feeds in the sidebar stopped working for mysterious reasons ...

But still, at least we were mentioned in the same breath! We all broke down at once.

New on the blogroll

Ed Barbier is one of the bloggers at the Triple Crisis blog. Here is some stuff from the about page:

The world is experiencing three simultaneous crises in finance, development, and the environment.  A number of economists are questioning the mainstream narratives and analyses of these crises.  Some of us have joined to create the Triple Crisis Blog to contribute to a more open and global dialogue around these three crises. ...

The aim of this blog is to provide fresh insights on current debates from an unprecedented network of economic analysts from the Global North and the Global South, from eleven countries.  In so doing, the Triple Crisis Blog seeks to generate dialogue in a way that has an exponential effect in terms of influencing policy-makers and the broader public.

Why didn't I think of that?

Blogging is a pain. Every day it is the same old thing ... picture of the day, daily demand and suppy, talk about my kids and what I've been eating, make fun of Tim. I think that the blog formerly known as Green, Inc has a great plan. Shut down and scatter the topic to the ends of the earth:

As we wind down this blog, readers have asked how best to follow The Times’s ongoing coverage of the environment.

Articles we publish on the subject will appear online on our environment page and in our Twitter feed for environment stories, @nytenvironment. Our colleague in Op-Ed, Andrew Revkin, has created a list of the Twitter accounts of former Green blog contributors called “Green Blog Voices.” Mr. Revkin’s own blog, DotEarth, remains a source for perspective on environmental concerns.

Coverage of the environment, energy and climate change will continue across a variety of desks and platforms at The Times, including Science, National and Business Day.

Get out of my way while I subscribe to multiple Twitter accounts!

And I'm dreaming of the day when I'm quitting. You'll be able to find the picture of the day on my office door, daily demand and supply in my class or hallway conversations, stuff about my kids on facebook, you can ask me at conferences about what I had for dinner and I'll be starting a daily e-newsletter (i.e., spam) making fun of Tim (you'll be able to find subscription details on my personal webpage).

Another sequester casuality?

Even a name change couldn't save the blog formerly known as Green, Inc (at least I can finally let go of my irritation at the name change):

The Times is discontinuing the Green blog, which was created  to track environmental and energy news and to foster lively discussion of developments in both areas. This change will allow us to direct production resources to other online projects. But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.

Thanks to all of our readers.

You're welcome.

And here is the addendum to that post:

We’re moving, but we’ll only be a mouse-click away.

Please watch for environmental policy news on the Caucus blog and energy technology news on the Bits blog.

There looks to be plenty of political news at the Caucus blog, so I'll pass. And "energy technology"? Oh dear lord no thanks!

I guess I'll continue to get my DC environmental news from my local Tea Party newsletter. 

An example of why we started this blog...and why it is still relevant

Bear with me, this might take a minute to get to the point.  In 2005, John and I started Env-Econ with the following mission:

The Environmental Economics blog is dedicated to the dissemination of economists’ views on current environmental and natural resource issues. We hope this blog will help bring economists’ views on environmental issues further into the mainstream. The intended audience includes the general public and students. Posts are non-technical. [emphasis added]

I added the emphasis to that in light of a comment I received this morning on this post from yesterday.  As background: in the post, I asked an academic colleague to give me a back of the envelope calculation of the social value of beach renourishment.  At the end of the post I linked to the academic article on which my colleague based the back of the envelope calcualtion--mainly to give credit where credit is due and also to let any reader so inclined to take a look at what goes into making the sausage that is Env-Econ.  Anyway, one of our readers was so inclined--and apparently didn't like what  they saw in the sausage factory:

I tried to read and understand Sathya Gopalakrishnan's abstract and I can't. I need an interpreter. I'm pretty sure it's English. Maybe someone could get a "grant" to find out just what percent of the US adult population accurately understands her language? Maybe I'm just dumb. I do have a B.S. degree from a highly regarded university but that was a long time ago.

A few points:

1. What percentage of the US adult population accurately understands her language is irrelevant for the abstract.  The abstract is intended for an audience of academic environmental economists and as such the relevant question is 'What percentage of the world population of those interested in academic issues relevant to environmental economists understand her language?'  Based on almost 20 years of experience (including a stint co-editing the journal in question), I would venture a guess that the percentage is very high--but the denominator in that percentage is pretty small.
2. The commenter has discovered one of the dirty little secrets of academics.  We academics like to use jargon, big words and complicated phrasing to make it intentionally difficult to understand what we are trying to say.  In doing so we create a nice barrier to entry into the profession. It takes years of additional education just to be able to learn the language of our discipline.  That education is costly both in terms of resources and time expended.  But for those who clear the barrier, the level of complication helps to keep the supply of academics who can make things as unnecessarily complicated as we do, and more importantly understand that complication, low.  And we all know that decreased supply increases prices (in this case wages).  So, you see, unnecessary complication is necessary.  It's a means to self-preservation and higher wages.
3. There are usually less complicated ways to explain highly technical stuff without losing the basics of what is being said.  That is the purpose of this blog.  Allow me to illustrate.  Here is an excerpt from the academic abstract in question:

We use the empirical results to parameterize a dynamic optimization model of beach nourishment decisions and show that the predicted interval between nourishment projects is closer to what we observe in the data when we use the estimate from the instrumental variables model rather than OLS. As coastal communities adapt to climate change, we find that the long-term net value of coastal residential property can fall by as much as 52% when erosion rate triples and cost of nourishment sand quadruples.

To the non-academic (hopefully many of our readers), that reads as follows:

We use the [blah] to [blah-blah] of beach nourishment decisions and show that the [blah] between [blah] is closer to [blah] when we use the [blah-blah] from the [HOLY S***]. As coastal communities adapt to climate change, we find that the [blah] of coastal residential property can fall by as much as [a bunch of made-up crap].

So in good Env-Econ fashion allow me to interpret the abstract:

Using a bunch of complicated statistics and math that no one else has thought to use, we find that beach house prices fall when beaches wash away or when the cost of putting more sand on the beach goes up.

That, our dear readers, is why we started this blog.

No need to thanks us.

Please don't comment on this post #FreeDaleAskey

From The Chronicle:

A university librarian who is being sued after writing a critical blog post about a scholarly publisher is finding support from professors and librarians around the world.

In 2010, Dale Askey, now a librarian at McMaster University, in Ontario, wrote a blog post about Edwin Mellen Press on his personal Web site, Bibliobrary, referring to the publisher as "dubious" and saying its books were often works of "second-class scholarship." For a few months afterward, several people chimed in in the blog's comments section, some agreeing with Mr. Askey, others arguing in support of the publisher.

In June 2012, Edwin Mellen Press's founder, Herbert Richardson, issued a notice of action to Mr. Askey, suing him for more than $1-million. That same day, the press issued a similar notice of action to Mr. Askey and McMaster University, telling them that they were being sued for $3-million. In the lawsuits, filed in a Canadian court, Mr. Richardson and the press are seeking damages for both the blog post and the comments left by the blog's readers.

We're a top 100 finance blog!

From the inbox:

Hi Tim and John,

I just wanted to let you know that I did a (pretty lighthearted) study to work out the Top 100 Finance Blogs, and Environmental Economics got in. You can check out the article I wrote about it here: http://suitpossum.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-100-top-anglo-saxon-finance-blogs.html.

I'm an ex-derivatives broker, and got a book coming out in May called The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money. Thanks for the great blog.

All the best,
Brett Scott

I have no idea how we made this list, but we did. Or maybe it is our tight analysis of the secondary market for CO2 permits?

A nonzero probability

From the inbox (from a real person):

Did I tell you I often visit your blog on environmental economics? :)

My reply:

... keep reading the blog. There is a slight chance you might find something useful someday!

We have a microeconomics blog*

Mark Thoma:

Peter Dorman:

In the Blogosphere, Econ Looks Macro, econospeak: I’m mainly a microeconomist. There are lots of folks like me. I don’t know the percentages, but surely microeconomists make up a large proportion of the global econ profession. Lots of important ideas and empirical discoveries are flowing through the micro pipeline all the time. Yet if you didn’t know anything else about economics other than what you read in the blogosphere, you’d think that most economists were on the macro side, that the main schools of thought in macro determine how we are sorted intellectually, that the real-world importance of economics is mainly about economic growth, employment, inflation, etc., and that macro is where the new ideas are. How come? Is it because the financial crisis and its global consequences, like the bitter politics of fiscal budgets, are currently at center stage? Or because the news cycle in macro is so much faster, with new data points popping up every day? Or is it because the ideological implications of macroeconomic disputes are more apparent than most micro dustups? Or because key players, like Mark Thoma (who should wear a headband saying “I am a public good”) and Paul Krugman, are mainly macro? Actually, there are huge things happening on the micro side of the aisle. Climate change remains one of the world’s fundamental challenges, the battle against mass poverty has taken a micro-ish turn, and a slow-mo intellectual drama of vast significance is taking place in welfare economics—it’s crumbling under the weight of behavioral econ and related threats. Applied micro is largely on autopilot, so theoretical developments are mostly out of view, but the whole idea of the blogosphere is that everything is potentially in view. How do we get to where millions of online readers feel the day is not complete without a dose of microeconomic controversy, or that their vocabulary is missing something if it doesn’t include network externalities and subgame perfection?

I check several micro sites each day, so they aren't completely absent, and some sites are hard to categorize. But it is true that macroeconomic issues are more prevalent in the blogosphere and in the news more generally (to answer why, I'd turn to simple supply and demand explanations, though saying that macro is more in demand by the general public begs the question of why).

What micro blogs should people know about?

Update: I'm really hesitant to do this since I know I've missed someone (and I also know how annoying it is to be overlooked). But to get the list started, let me offer: Digtopoly, The Leisure of the Theory Class, Environmental Economics, Sports Economist, and Cheap Talk. Freakonomics also does lots of micro. (If I missed your blog, please add it in comments.)

I don't know if this is universal, but one thing about a microeconomics blog is the blogger ends up saying the same thing over and over again. A higher gas tax this, cap-and-trade that. I'm sure the bloggees never get tired of reading it, but the bloggers might get tired of writing it over and over. Foresight into that fact (i.e., what in the world might I write about every day? [we found out how to solve that little problem]), might deter entry into the microeconomics blog market.

*Thanks for the link Mark!

CSWEP tackles economics blogs

From the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession webpage:

The Winter 2012 CSWEP Newsletter is now available online.  Jennifer Imazeki has organized terrific articles around the theme of Using Social Media in Economics.

The articles an introduction by Imazeki, "the impact of economics blogs" (McKenzie and Ozler), "teaching with economics blogs" (Whitehead) and "using social media for self-promotion" (Connelly).

I eagerly anticipate learning about how I can more effectively self-promote (snarky comments welcome)!

Update, from Jennifer's intro (via her blog):

In “The Impact of Economics Blogs,” World Bank economists and bloggers Berk Özler and David McKenzie discuss the role of economics blogs in the dissemination of research. They point out that blogs provide both private benefits, in the form of increased recognition and prestige for bloggers themselves, and external benefits, in the form of increased recognition for the authors of papers that are mentioned on (at least the top) economics blogs, as well as increased knowledge and changed perceptions among readers. John Whitehead (who also blogs himself) turns from research to teaching in “Teaching with Economics Blogs.” His summary of a recent survey of bloggers and blog readers suggests that blogs can be an excellent way to have students begin engaging with economic material and learning the way that economists think. Finally, Rachel Connelly explores the idea of using technology to facilitate self-promotion, providing some concrete suggestions for how to get started in “Using Social Media for Self-Promotion.”

After all, I am, first and foremost, a dedicated teacher (snarky comments welcome).