Economists who blog

There's a brief article in this week's Economist (behind the subscriber wall, I'm afraid), talking about some notable blogging economists:

Why do economists spend valuable time blogging?

"Clearly there is here a problem of the division of knowledge, which is quite analogous to, and at least as important as, the problem of the division of labour," Friedrich Hayek told the London Economic Club in 1936. What Mr Hayek could not have known about knowledge was that 70 years later weblogs, or blogs, would be pooling it into a vast, virtual conversation. That economists are typing as prolifically as anyone speaks both to the value of the medium and to the worth they put on their time.

Like millions of others, economists from circles of academia and public policy spend hours each day writing for nothing. The concept seems at odds with the notion of economists as intellectual instruments trained in the maximisation of utility or profit. Yet the demand is there: some of their blogs get thousands of visitors daily, often from people at influential institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve.

Of course, economists are not all created equal in their writing ability and skill at explaining technical concepts for a lay audience. One of the strengths of the staff at The Economist is their ability to write clear, understandable articles which manage to convey a fair amount of technical detail without becoming completely incomprehensible to non-economists among the readership.