While the blog got its start with Joy Buchanan in mid-2020, we are now just finishing up our first full year and now have a full weekly slate of bloggers. This seems like a good opportunity to reflect on our most popular posts from each of our regular bloggers. We hope you enjoy looking back at these popular posts.
Monday: Mike Makowsky
Makowsky‘s most popular post was from May 2021, titled “Academic Publishing: How I think we got here.” This post generated a significant amount of discussion on Twitter among economists and other academics, and is the second most widely read post on this blog with almost 10,000 views. Makowsky outlined the history and incentives of “how we got here” in terms of the problems with academic publishing, and he is skeptical that there is any easy fix. It seems there is nothing economists love arguing about more than our profession itself. (Follow Makowsky on Twitter)
Tuesday: Scott Buchanan
Scott Buchanan‘s most popular post is “Money as a Social Construct” is from September 2020. It discusses the very basic definition of what we mean by money, and the importance of social trust for both the functioning of money and general social order. The related theme of cryptocurrencies is something he has written a lot about in the last few months of 2020. (He is not yet on Twitter!)
Wednesday: Jeremy Horpedahl
This is me, and I’m not going to write in the third person. My most popular post, by far, is “Who is the Wealthiest Generation?” from September. It now has over 28,000 views, our most popular. Wow, I did not expect this! The view count not only helped from much discussion on Twitter, links from popular blogs (including our inspiration, Marginal Revolution), and simultaneously being featured on both the r/Economics and r/BadEconomics sections of Reddit. Is it good economics? Bad economics? Read for yourself and decide, but my main goal in that post was to show comparable data for the wealth of three recent generations at similar points in their lives. Economists and many others definitely like to argue about this one! (Follow me on Twitter)
Thursday: James Bailey
Bailey often writes about health care, but his most popular post is on regulation more broadly. His May post “Population Predicts Regulation” was a short but insightful post that summarized a paper of his on the relationship between population size and regulation. This means that not only do more progressive states like California and New York have lots of regulations, so do more traditionally conservatives states like Texas and Florida. A surprising, but clear finding in the data. (Follow Bailey on Twitter)
Friday: Zachary Bartsch
Bartsch‘s most popular post, like mine, is a response to a meme floating around on social media. In “Social Security: Not a Great/Terrible Investment” he crunches the numbers and finds that the meme on Social Security is… actually pretty reasonable! Fact checking is fun, and it’s not always about debunking a viral claim. Sometimes, you can provide support for a claim. Let the data speak for itself! (Follow Bartsch on Twitter)
Saturday: Joy Buchanan
From the one who started it all on this blog, Joy Buchanan‘s most popular post this year is “More computer jobs than San Francisco.” Using BLS data, she shows that while San Jose has the largest concentration of computer occupations, lots of other cities you might not expect rank high on the number of computer jobs. Bloomington, IN ranks above Seattle. Huntsville, AL ranks above San Francisco. Some stereotypes are confirmed, but new insights are learned when you examine the data. (Follow her on Twitter)
Sunday: Vincent Geloso
Geloso is our newest addition to the blog, but he already has several popular posts. His best so far is “The history of work and the myth of a leisurely past” from November. Vincent is an economic historian, and like many of his posts this one uses both theory and history to help us better understand the past. Welcome to the blog, Vincent! (Follow him on Twitter)
Thank you to all of our loyal readers. We look forward to bringing you more economics every day (it’s the title of the blog!) as we move into 2022.
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