Knowing and Making

Davis, Figgins, Hedengren and Klein have put together an interesting survey of American economics professors - asking about their favourite economists, alive and dead, and about the journals and blogs they read. I downloaded the data behind the paper in the vain hope that this blog might be among the long tail of responses not reported in the main paper (it wasn't). But the data does provide lots to think about. An intriguing point (from a survey design point of view, at least) is raised by one of the questions. The survey asked people to choose their most respected/admired economists from two groups: over 60 years old and under 60. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure I'd know the age of many of the economists I admire. I speculate that the respondents might have subconsciously chosen economists who are much older, or much younger, than 60 years of age, in order to answer these questions with greater certainty. Even if aware of this potential bias, I might ...

This question is prompted by a few things. First, seeing the same commenters pop up on obscure and unrelated blogs as appear on famous and prominent ones (hello Min, dearieme, Don, to pick three at random). Second, meeting the author of one of my regular blogs at a show written by another , and finding they collaborated on the show I was at . Third, realising that although my readership is still relatively small (one day, Krugman, one day...), it includes a surprisingly high proportion of other bloggers whom I respect, and whose occasional links to me are flattering and pleasing. My first thought, then, is to wonder whether the blogosphere (at least the economics blogs) is populated by a few hundred people who just spend all their time reading each other's postings, and a few hundred more who comment on them. My second thought was, if it is, then that's not so bad. Mostly, the people with blogs are the ones you want to read your work - the thoughtful, intelligent...

So tomorrow is the big day: the result of the Superfreakonomics counting contest ! My logarithmically scaled maximal-gap estimate , as you'll recall, was 88,782. This number was my carefully calibrated guess for the number of Google results shown for "Superfreakonomics". At first I was worried that my number might be too high . But in fact I was stunningly inaccurate in the other direction. The current figure, one day before the authors will calculate the final result, is 737,000 . It has been increasing at tens of thousands per day and will likely creep up a bit more before the search is carried out at 6am Eastern time tomorrow. Two scenarios are possible: Either, one of the other contestants has gamed the Google search in order to bring the results up to their guess - probably not worth it, as such skills are highly marketable in the search engine manipulation, I mean optimisation, industry. Then again, I've wasted a couple of hours writing about it by now so we can...

Today: consumer perceptions of value in blog postings, and its relation to the evolution of judgment. I have noticed recently a lot of blog posts which set out basically to shoot down other bloggers. I'm sure you share my lack of surprise at this phenomenon: it's been a staple of Internet debate for decades. Could this be because economists (or people in general) are just disagreeable? Or is it because these postings serve a real or perceived consumer demand for conflict? A minor tangent : Such a demand, if it exists, might arise from an evolutionary or learned response to the marginal value of information. A single new item of knowledge which acts towards confirmation of existing data is probably less valuable than one which contradicts it. This would be explained by an effect of diminishing marginal authority of data in each direction. Let's say that Paul Krugman says the stimulus is too small. You may, for the sake of argument, infer that there's a 50% chance the sti...