If you are an economist and maintain a blog, the best way to get an audience is to get into fights with pundits and journalists, and you then easily become a pundit yourself, losing the impartiality you are supposed to have as a scientist. The most popular economist bloggers are either openly libertarian or quite far right, or in reaction resolutely on the left. Almost all engage in politicking and wars of words and have basically abandoned the principles of impartiality their scientific upbringing taught them. The impartial scientists are drowned.
EconAcademics.org tries to rectify that, aggregating blog posts that discuss research, or at least refer to research. The list of monitored blogs is impressively long, yet it saddens me to see that the "popular" blogs are nowhere to be seen near the top of those who have discussed the most research, despite their considerable volume of posts. While I could be proud to be (far) ahead on this last list, it saddens me again how little consistent discussion of research there is. Out in the blogosphere, are we really so few economists doing this? Why can't the top economics blogs relate more to the results of their field?
A positive externality of EconAcademics.org is that is compiles a list of all papers I discussed, including where the ultimately got published. I have put the link in the sidebar and will come back to discuss it sometime soon.
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