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Wednesday, 04 July 2007 |
Andrew Leonard writes in Salon about how publishing in economics is increasingly disconnected from the "real world". He suggests that an exception to this may be the vigor by which economists have taken to writing and blogging online.
Leonard cites Richard Baldwin, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva:
"On the bright side, the Internet has two features that make it an
excellent vehicle for bridging the research-reality gap. Feature No.1:
its technology makes publishing very cheap. Feature No.2: its global
span makes it possible to find an audience that is both large and
homogeneous in terms of background knowledge. On the dark side, these
two features have produced a cacophony. Bloggers -- embracing Feature
No.1 and hoping for Feature No.2 -- have set up a shocking number of
sites ... But this is not the profession's response to the Discussion Sections of
medical journals. It is more like the collegial coffee-room discussions
we used to have when there was time for such things."
Leonard counters this point with a rallying cry for academic blogging:
"The econo-blogosphere is more than a collegial coffee-room discussion.
It's closer to an internationally-distributed graduate seminar, in
which the lucky students get to watch -- and participate in -- a
round-robin debate featuring scores of professors duking it out. It is
also an early-warning system for new academic papers of note and an
instant provider of context and analysis for each new blip of economic
data. It is, to put it most simply, an education." |
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Academic Blogging 
