Surgery does weird things to you; you become emotional at unexpected moments; bursts of energy are wills o the wisp; many visitors come that you cannot really respond to as you want to. So anyway, to second Janet below, yes, thanks for everything, from readers I did not know I had until this week. I own my intestines again. I'm still at the hospital and will now go take a walk, which is how I get better. A few steps at a time. But I expect to go home over the weekend. Extra sutures and drains were removed about two hours ago, I'm a bit sore from that but this will pass in a few hours, I'm confident. Next week being finals week, I have some room to coast for a bit.

An orderly just asked if I wanted water with ice. In any normal circumstance I would have said thanks but that I'd get it myself. Try to be very polite, but self-reliant. One lesson I learned this week is how to accept kindness with gratitude, without feelings of obligation or shame. Not sure I knew this before. I haven't given up individualism by any stretch, but our humanity needs an opportunity to express its care for other individuals, and to know that to give people that opportunity to do it, person-to-person, is part of what makes us feel our own.

I apologize to not linking back to posts from Michael, Gary, Leo, Ed, Andy and others. I cannot get through the BlogNetNews reader for Minnesota, not enough energy. But I deeply appreciate every one. I have never felt so supported.

Labels: blogging, life

Not affiliated with the Scholars, but Matt Barton, who teaches ENGL 432/532, Writing on the Web, has students writing a political blog. Greetings to Mr. Barton's students!

Labels: blogging, SCSU

Program notes for the week:

• Today, at 12:15, I am speaking at the U of M Law School, Room 25, on what makes nations rich and poor. Some ideas from the book, but mostly a walk through some random thoughts on how people look at development. Courtesy the Tocqueville Center.
• Tomorrow through Friday, the KNSI Morning Show, filling in for Don Lyons, 6-8am. 1450 AM on your dial if you're in St. Cloud or nearby, otherwise the show does stream (sometimes.)

As usual, busy and probably light blogging. But the book would be shipped if not for one page of references somebody didn't turn in yet. So light is at the end of the tunnel...

Labels: blogging, Media

Ob: absolutely nothing, I was reading something on a discussion list and wanted to find a quote from the Big Lebowski to respond. The quote page on IMDb seems to me to be the whole damn script, but out of order. And I lost twenty minutes laughing through it. If you ask me for favorite movie ever, that's in the family photo.

OK, the last paper for the book has arrived, and I'm off to finish editing, followed by Littlest's last game of her grade school basketball career. Lileks does this all the time, so why can't I?

The quote, you ask? It was about nihilists. And until this guy changes the spelling of his URL, he's blackballed from the Northern Alliance. I type the wrong one every time.

Labels: big lebowski, blogging

You would never know it, but two blogs of the Northern Alliance joined at the same time; the last to join was Captain's Quarters in December 2003. But one less will remain after next month.

Beginning on March 1, I will begin working for Michelle Malkin, a friend, mentor, and writer I have long admired. She has offered me a position as writer at Hot Air, and my blogging will appear exclusively there.

That means that I will close out Captain’s Quarters sometime in March. This saddens me, as it has become my ever-ready home and because of the terrific community it has generated. I hope that the CapQ community comes with me to Hot Air, and Hot Air will have open registration today for 12 hours in order to allow CapQ commenters to join me at my new digs.

Nobody who meets Ed ever dislikes the guy; nobody who reads his blog can doubt he's one of the hardest workers in blogging. The friendship between Malkin and Ed goes back a good ways and the move will make Hot Air one of the leading sites for political commentary on the internet for a long time. I know we've had some top blogs retired because of writer fatigue in the past, but has any been subject to a buyout before? (I assume his new compensation plan from Malkin includes a lifetime supply of Notre Dame football jerseys.)

Worth noting: In his 12/03 post accepting NA entrance (NARN was still four months away) Ed said:

I don't listen to a lot of talk radio because I find that a great deal of it is shrill and annoying, and even when people don't make a habit of screaming into a microphone, they still tend to get childish and demeaning.

And Al Franken wasn't even on the air yet! Ed's keeping his archives up indefinitely.

I had to go back and look at the formation of the Alliance while thinking a few minutes about this. Originally considered to be Lileks, PowerLine and Fraters Libertas (now known as Act One, or the Opening Act, or Top Billing, or whatever in our radio lives), we added Mitch and myself in May 2003 before Ed. One guy now runs the blog of a newspaper, another group is giving away $25k for a book prize, and Ed is off to Hot Air.

I guess my life as Pete Best continues. Mitch, Chad and Brian? Your comments invited.

Labels: blogging, NARN

While the rest of the Minnesota blogosphere was watching the MN House Transportation debate in either gleeful fascination (tax consumers) or horror (tax producers), I was hunkered down with a presentation to do last night at the Kelly Inn for the Economic Education Winter Institute's Economic Outlook. It's the 12th year we've done it, the fourth for me. The local newspaper report leads with my remarks. I notice at the time of this writing that the article drew over 200 comments. I don't have time to read them -- I'll explain more in a minute. But state economist Tom Stinson was also on the panel, and the paper's reports of his remarks bear noting:

Some of the big factors that are causing the decline are in the housing industry and the credit market, Stinson said.

New housing starts have been the lowest since World War II and have declined 25 percent during the last year.

"We're not making a dent in the (housing) inventory," Stinson said. "We have an 11-month inventory, we would like to have a four-month inventory."

Senior loan officers also are tightening standards of all types of credit in the commercial and home markets, Stinson said.

The state's diversified economy hasn't allowed it to become recession-proof, he said.

"Minnesota is going to have another slow year," Stinson said.

While his and my definition of slow might be different, notice that he DID use the word "slow". Slow could mean slow growth. As I said last night, the growth rate of jobs in Minnesota has to expand enough to absorb new workers. Tom Gillaspy, the state demographer, reminded the audience that this is the year the first of the Baby Boom generation turns 62. It's therefore not clear whether this will slow expansion of the labor force. This and 2009 represent also the last of the boomlet of students graduating high school. Nonetheless, it can easily turn out that Minnesota grows at a very sluggish rate rather than slumps (declining state GDP), and this would lower revenues somewhat below forecast as well as see a rise in unemployment. I don't think Stinson rules that possibility out, and after reading that I conclude his and my forecasts are closer together than I had previously thought. (I'm probably still a little more optimistic than Tom, but that's a pretty normal state of affairs.) We'll have to wait for the forecast on Thursday for more precise figures, but that's my read of what he was saying.

While I would have liked to have stuck around more last night and then discussed the transportation transit tax bill today, I went to my secret life today. I am confessing to being a basketball junkie, particularly when it is Littlest at play. Her school plays in a tournament in New Ulm each February, and this is her last year in the school so our last tournament. I suppose I could have had someone drive her down but I would not miss this for the world. Watching 10-14 year olds from very small schools -- hers has less than thirty students for K-8 -- play co-ed is pretty neat. Watching your Littlest chug up and down the floor with a huge smile on her face, one that does not vary if her team is up 10 or down 20, and seeing it on all the other kids too, is a world I will miss escaping into as she heads to high school next year. She will try to continue playing for her next school -- she can score and she's a ferocious defender, though probably has to move from point guard now -- but I don't think HS will be the same. We were within two with two minutes to go but lost by six today and out of the championship. Momentary sadness, then the kids realized they were here for the rest of the day to play around and have another game tomorrow, and the usual frantic buzzing of tweens and teens resumed.

Janet is kind enough to sit in for me tomorrow on Final Word, and I will not hear the show as her next game -- the last they will play here -- is at 3:15 for a consolation prize. If they win there'll be a small trophy, but regardless there'll be pictures and memories. And for a weekend, not a care about the soft economy or your silly transit ripoff.

I've just been called to pizza.

Labels: blogging, economics, legislature, Minnesota

I am venturing onto Blog Talk Radio again, but not with Ed. Jazz Shaw of Middle Earth Journal and a denizen of Ed's chat room on Heading Right has invited me to Mid Stream Radio at noon CT today. I was supposed to be there Monday but life intervenes while you're waiting for the next thing to do. Your usual economics and politics mix is on tap and now that we have New Hampshire to digest it should be a good half-hour or so.

Labels: blogging, Media

There has been a good bit of chat around the economics blogosphere about whether the best economics blogs are in danger of dying off because the opportunity costs of blogging are too high. My short answer is: High relative to what?

Blogging is of course subject to the MB=MC rule, and undoubtedly the best economists are busy. But the benefits to them from blogging might be greater. Tyler Cowen pointed out earlier this year that blogging is a form of self-experimentation:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

I'm sure that last point was humor, but the rest is certainly true. A drawback for me in some ways is that in writing my book now, I'm more direct, shorter, and less willing to let a part of my writing wander on a tangent. It's true also in teaching -- I get more done.

Am I more tolerant? I don't really know about that, but I think I can express my differences with others better than I did when I started this five-plus years ago. I find I read more, have more interesting conversations with others, and have met some great economists and non-economists through this blog. As Dani Rodrik found out, you have no idea who's reading until they either leave you a comment or, more often, tell you in person later on. (We think of them as separate worlds; at least in the world of MOB blogging, it's not. I know now dozens of Minnesota bloggers I'd've never met before, and some of them are friends in the real rather than online world.)

Because I read more now, I think research is improved too.

Now without a doubt, the Mankiws and Rodriks and Cowens of the world do not need blogs to be known; they are not really adding to their audiences. I am, because I teach at Flyover State. (Note: I say 'teach at', not 'am a professor at'; therein lies a huge difference in how we see our jobs.) I get the high-opportunity-cost thing -- as you've probably noticed, my output here is down because the book is already past deadline and not ready to ship yet (so why are you writing this? --ed.). But you cannot evaluate the costs in isolation.

Blogging of course isn't for everyone, and perhaps because some of the now-big names weren't here three years ago there will be a shake-out; many startups die, in restaurants and blogs. But you learn the benefits, and your blog evolves. Take a look at my archives and you'll see this is a far different place than when it started. I've even thought of a name change to reflect that, though the brand capital in Scholars is high enough to make that a problem I have to think about. Whatever we call it, it's both more costly and more rewarding for me now than when I started.

UPDATE: See this also by Bill Polley. I worry about the lemons problem only insofar as one thinks econoblogging is about spreading the word of what's on the cutting edge of economics research or the policy debates. I have never concerned myself with the former, and as to the latter, I'm not terribly convinced that the best policy analysis comes from the economists with the longest c.v.'s. Again, that might be about where I'm from and what I do, a personal bias. Your call, not mine, whether I'm a lemon. Arnold Kling most certainly is not.

Labels: blogging, economics

The Times runs a headline story today on the use of a blog and a wiki to drum up discussion and action on the Sauk Rapids-Rice school levy vote. I'm quoted a few times in this story. I don't know how many views these pages get -- the blog has a counter indicating less than 4000 hits, which would be about eight days on my site (check sitemeters to the right). The billboard in the story caught my eye as I drove down the highway yesterday morning after a meeting north of Sauk Rapids; it is very hard to read that sign driving 65 mph, so the news coverage probably gave the anonymous blogger more publicity than he could have expected.

Many blogs will cover levy campaigns and take sides, but doing so with a new blog is to me likely to be less effective than coverage on an existing blog. More of them, I suspect, are like this, created by the affected school teachers.

Labels: blogging, St. Cloud