Economic Literacy and the Blogosphere
Here's a great quote by Russ Roberts in the Wall Street Journal' EconoBlog: bq. One source for optimism in this otherwise bleak analysis [of economic literacy] is the blogosphere. I think it's very hard to teach the economic way of thinking. But reading the best economics blogs is like sitting around the faculty lounge absorbing the economic way of thinking by example. The blogosphere has made it a lot cheaper to acquire good economic intuition. And it has made bad journalism a little more expensive. My sentiments exactly. There has always been a market for ideas, but for all sorts of reasons, exchange was inhibited, prohibited, isolated, or disconnected. The Internet, and by extension the blogosphere, has literally smashed those barriers into pieces with the free flow of information eventually gushing unabated. And those ideas that percolate to the top, the ones which Russ speaks of, are generated by some of the smartest people on the planet. It's a free education to anyone and that is truly a beautiful thing.
