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October 19, 2007
The opportunity cost of blogging
Dani Rodrik notes Greg Mankiw's recent post announcing the end of comments on his blog and wonders, "Is the econ-blogosphere sustainable?"
At this rate, in any case?
Two things happened in the last twenty-four hours which made me wonder if some of the best economics blogs may be on their way out. First, an economist with a very high-quality blog told me that he was not sure if he had made the right decision by starting it. He said he worried about coming up with new content on a daily basis, and that he may run out of energy at some point. Then, Greg Mankiw declares that he is too busy to be reading and filtering all the comments he gets on his site and turns off the comments section. In a long post, he says the whole blog thing is taking too much of his time, and intimates that he may not be doing this for ever.
So if economists with high opportunity costs of time start to get out, shall we have a lemons problem on our hands? Will eventually the only prolific bloggers remain the ones that are not worth reading?
It is ironic that this post comes in a rather slow period in my own blogging. My excuse? Working on getting a conference paper out. Not to mention the fact that conferences aside, as late October rolls around a lot of us in the academic community find ourselves in a pretty busy time. It's what I call the rhythm of the semester. In my case, a lot more is hitting right now than would be usual even for late October. Opportunity cost, baby!
But to call this a "lemons" problem is to imply that there is some information asymmetry in the market. In other words, when there are a lot of blogs out there, it is harder for people to tell which ones are the "good" ones and which ones are the lemons. Unable to command a price to cover their opportunity cost, the "good" bloggers exit and you're left with lemons.
Nah.
Finding a good blog is a lot easier than finding a good used car, and the commitment factor is a lot less of an issue. If you buy a lemon used car you're stuck. If you find you're reading a sub-par blog, you can move on. Information is passed in the form of links that tie us all together. Yes, there can be a bit of an echo chamber in some corners, but particularly in the economics wing of the blogosphere there is also a lot of cross-traffic between writers of different ideological persuasions. I mean, I comment at Angry Bear once in a while. They haven't kicked me out yet. My comments and their responses there and here build a stock of information about our blogs that makes it way around the network of readers. That helps people make decisions about who to read. So while I wouldn't say that the econ-blogosphere is a picture of a perfect market of ideas, it's got a lot of things going for it. I don't think the lemons issue is much of a problem.
I have a feeling that the stable long run equilibrium will have some of the better blogs that feature mostly economics and less of the daily political bloodsport will post better items less frequently. Also, blogs by academics will be subject to bursts of activity and periods of relative quiet. Readers who become familiar with that rhythm will accept it the same way that TV viewers are accustomed to sweeps week and summer reruns.
In other words, the death of the econ-blogosphere has been greatly exaggerated. It seems much more likely to me that the medium is simply entering another stage in its development.
Posted by William Polley at October 19, 2007 12:23 AM
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Comments
Longterm something like the Angry Bear and Econospeak model will probably dominate, two or three regular poster/gatekeepers and an assortment of associates and guests. Certainly this model has come to dominate the political progressive portion of the blogosphere, people like Markos and Josh, first encountered as first person bloggers now having created veritable empires.
Another possibility is to take the route Micheal Perelman does. He maintains Unsettling Economist with one set of commenters and cross posts the same essay to Econospeak. So far there seems to be a one to one correspondance but off course that wouldn't need to be the case. The same economics blogger could post some or all of his content on a bigger group blog with perhaps a more detailed or technical version on the home blog.
But collaboration seems to be the norm. The people who try to keep this up as a side job all on their own are going to have a hard time of it, if that is you want to build and maintain traffic. I am not sure how Thoma and DeLong keep it up, the latter in particular is a content machine.
Posted by: Bruce Webb at October 19, 2007 03:48 PM
Cross posting may indeed be the way of the future.
One might also point out that with RSS, you don't have to be obsessed with constantly cranking out content. Without RSS there is no way that I could stay on top of all of the blogs and other news sources that I do. As the blogosphere grows and the readership becomes increasingly sophisticated, RSS and other such tools will be indispensable.
For now, I'm happy being a "one-man-band". This blog is a window on my interests as an economist and as a human being. Readers should hopefully get a flavor for what it might be like in my classroom or at my lunch table--all at no cost but your time and the toll on your mouse clicking finger. It also helps me keep a record of the things I see that may be useful later. It has helped me become more organized in my teaching. Those are good reasons to keep it going, even if preparing for a conference or other pressing matters lead me to take a few days off here and there.
Posted by: William Polley at October 19, 2007 08:43 PM