Comments on: Legitimation effects

By: John Baughman

John Baughman — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 22:06:08 +0000

The only other active blogger among the faculty at my institution (a liberal arts college), AFAIK, teaches Classical Lit. None of my closest colleagues and grad school friends in political science at other institutions does. I’m not sure about its spread in my discipline as a whole, and even less how it compares to others, but it sounds to me like econ at GMU is very much an outlier.

By: Keivn Brancato

Keivn Brancato — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 20:26:38 +0000

Hmmm… GMU is the outlier for economics department bloggers—with a dozen or so grad students who blog, and about a half dozen professors who do so. What are the outlier departments/universities in other disciplines? Is the number of students/profs higher than GMU?

By: decon

decon — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 14:14:48 +0000

Delong has comments. Wonder if Becker/Posner will? And does anyone who reads a wide variety of academic blogs care to provide an anecdotal view of which fields embrace comments and which do not?

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 13:35:10 +0000

- I say, I say, I say, their blog’s got no posts! – Really, how does it portend? – Extensively!

By: Doppler Sonar

Doppler Sonar — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 01:40:00 +0000

Philosophers blog because they like to blather on knowing that no one is listening or reading. Just responding. Quantoids don’t blog because it requires too many words. The world is thankful for their absence. Big names don’t blog because they’re being cheated out of what they see as the economic value they create everytime they pound their keyboards. Becker won’t last because of the above. And I’ll be thankful for that.

By: dk.dk

dk.dk — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:27:40 +0000

Yes, heaven forbid that people that deal with the study of people expose themselves to any feedback from, uh, people Ahh Chris, concern about mingling with the masses has been an inseparable part of academia for the best part of a century, and it hasn’t been confined to a particular side of the political spectrum either. eg. the logical positivists were aware of it just as much as the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School.

By: mikes

mikes — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 00:13:02 +0000

Political science ????????

By: John Baughman

John Baughman — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 22:15:24 +0000

I am two weeks into blogging and have yet to find my voice, specifically on this question of the degree of disciplinary content on my blog. As a political scientist who studies U.S. politics I have an out in that the general topic of most of my posts is current U.S. politics. However, only a few of the posts so far have been specifically informed by my research and/or training, and the discussions I have joined in the blogosphere have been on the level of punditry and not the scholarly. To this point, I have seen my scholarly engagement and my blogging as somewhat separate activities. The decision I made on tone at the outset, though it is evolving, is that it would appeal to those interested in politics rather than the much narrower sliver who care about model specification, equilibrium strategies and other arcana. At the same time, I do feel some pressure as a junior faculty member to make the time I spend on it more relevant to the professional tasks I need to accomplish, or not to spend the time at all. I’m not convinced that enough fellow scholars see this as a legitimate form of community or scholarly service. In other words, on this question of whether a new blog by senior scholars makes blogging more inviting for junior scholars: While the net expected payoff for someone of the stature of Becker and Posner may well be positive, I’m not sure that it is for me. From where I sit, the signal I hear sounds quite close to cheap talk. And so, perhaps against my professional interests and with some trepidation, I have joined the blogosphere.

By: a different chris

a different chris — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 22:09:59 +0000

Ok, did this jump out at anybody else (my emphasis): “senior scholars in many fields of the social sciences take a dim view of ‘popularizing.’” Yes, heaven forbid that people that deal with the study of people expose themselves to any feedback from, uh, people.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 21:00:32 +0000

Well if Becker’s doing it, it must be rational… and can’t have been rational until now!

By: Ingrid

Ingrid — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 20:56:39 +0000

I got an error message from the crooked server, and my comment seems not to have come through, so I’ll try again… I doubt we’ll see an explosion of economics blogs over the next 12 months, because many economists simply never engage with any ‘real’ issues, and certainly don’t like to debate with ‘outsiders’- on which they generally look down. My view of economists is that many of them live in their own little world that they have created for themselves, and lack the capacities to engage in a truely interdisciplinary dialogue, which I suppose an open forum would require. Obviously not all economists are like that, but if I am right about only half of the economists’ population, then there will always be fewer economics blogs, except if they start blogging among themselves, and find a way to keep the Others at the gate. PS: I am an economist myself, at least according to my MScE and PhD degrees

By: Ingrid

Ingrid — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 20:30:28 +0000

I doubt we’ll see an explosion of economics blogs over the next 12 months, because many economists simply never engage with any ‘real’ issues, and certainly don’t like to debate with ‘outsiders’- on which they generally look down. My view on economists is that many of them live in their own little world that they have created for themselves, and lack the capacities to engage in a truely interdisciplinary dialogue, which I suppose an open forum would require. Obviously they’re not all like that, but if I am right about only half of the economists’ population, then there will always be fewer economics blogs, except if they start blogging among themselves, and find a way to keep the Others at the gate. PS: I am an economist myself, at least according to my MScE and PhD degrees

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 19:38:05 +0000

Well if Becker’s doing it, it must be rational.

By: PZ Myers

PZ Myers — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 19:37:31 +0000

I notice there is a number of biology/medicine blogs over there on the right, but an awful lot of “moribunds”. I suspect Brian’s explanation is more likely: some fields are just better matches for the format of the weblog. I know it’s difficult to wrench one’s mind out of the very narrow and specific abstract-intro-methods-results-discussion writing style that is inculcated into all budding biologists at the instant they enter college, and writing something that is often simply the expansion of a single thought rather than the exploration of a pile of data is somewhat alien.

By: Brian Weatherson

Brian Weatherson — Mon, 29 Nov 2004 19:37:18 +0000

I should say it’s all from memory on the timing front, so I could be wildly mistake, and there obviously have been many blogs started after Brian started his. But I do kinda find it hard to believe he’s a prime cause. For one thing, he blogs so little about his research, which is the mainstay of most other philosophy blogs, that he’d be an odd role model for others to follow.