Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
My apologies for the lack of new posts, but a weekend of migraines and one of the busiest weeks of the semester mean that I have little time to write new posts these days. Posting will resume on Monday, October 15.
Many of you have paid their first visit to this blog in the last few days, after my post on the trading game went viral on Reddit last Wednesday and Greg Mankiw linked to it on Thursday. If this describes you, welcome to my blog, and thank you for coming back.
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I blog about development economics, agricultural development, food policy, economics, and empirical methods in the social sciences, with a few miscellaneous posts every once in a while.
I make absolutely no money from this website (no, not even when you buy a book on Amazon as a consequence of one of my links; that program is not legal in North Carolina), and I don’t ever intend to. I do this purely to contribute to current policy debates, contribute to my profession, interact with like-minded people, and become a better writer.
Oh, and I am always on the lookout for good topics. So if you’d like to see me write on a given topic, please email me.
Openness, or: Reason #353 Why I Blog
Andrew Gelman nicely summarizes an important reason why he blogs — and, incidentally, why I blog, too:
2. Openness: In a blog I can write about the limitations of my work. It’s a real challenge to discuss limitations in a scholarly article, as we’re always looking over our shoulder at what referees might think. Sure, sometimes I can get away with writing “Survey weighting is a mess,” but my impression is that most scholarly articles are relentlessly upbeat. Sort of like how a magazine article typically will have a theme and just plug it over and over. In a blog we can more easily admit uncertainty.
More here.
I feel as though that reason is especially important in
economicsthe social sciences, where one’s salesmanship is often what makes or break one’s papers owing to the fact that readers often make up their minds about the quality of a paper before they reach the end of the introduction. In the sciences, articles are much shorter, and there is a sense that no article is perfect.