And on the Lighter Side of Life ...

The LA.Times has a story today about Econbloggers (Hat tip Mankiw) and how some are almost being elevated to celebrity status. More importantly though the article also to some degree picks up on how this environment of bloggers and commentators has helped to shed a new and more positive light on economics as a discipline. The article is naturally US biased and don't grind down to the core in what econbloggers do; that is to add considerable value to the economics debate and profession through the sharing of knowledge. In many ways we could see the the very loosely defined econblogsphere as the frontline in the economics and indeed political/scientific debate.

Ok, I'd better hold for now and leave you with an excerpt of this, after all, well written piece.

Fame found Tyler Cowen on the back seat of an airport bus.

Travel-weary after a long flight back from a family vacation, the economics professor was returning to his car at Baltimore/Washington International Airport. Suddenly, a man leaned across the bus aisle to shake Cowen's hand, pronouncing himself a "huge fan" — not of Cowen's economics work, but of the Internet blog the George Mason University faculty member created three years ago.

"My first question was, 'How do you know what I look like?' " Cowen said. "I thought that was a little strange."

Before the Internet came along, Cowen was many things. New Jersey's 1977 chess champion, for instance. The author of an ethnic dining guide to the Washington area as well as academic papers with snappy titles like "More Monitoring Can Induce Less Effort."

But since he and colleague Alex Tabarrok started the blog Marginal Revolution, which has had more than 6 million visitors, Cowen has become something he didn't even know existed: an economics celebrity.