Hibernation

Dear occasional readers,

During 2014 this blog experience secular stagnation of a sort and in 2015 I plan for it to go into hibernation. I want to redirect you to the two other blogs that I hope to put some effort into:

• The one is the blog of the School of Economics. The plan is to focus on the research outputs of my colleagues and to make their reviews and analysis accessible to other academics, students, policymakers (and whoever else might be interested). I also hope to share some news with our alumni and share resources aimed specifically at our post-graduate students.
• The other is a spin-off from the School's blog. Last year I started to add Economics content linked to the high school curriculum and now you can find it at Ekonomieblog.me. The idea is to inspire the next generation of Economics students by providing a one-stop portal for data, analysis and opinions about the South African economy. Here I find the inspiration in Marginal Revolution University's slogan: Learn, Teach, Share.

I hope to blog like there is no opportunity cost.

Academic writing and the blogosphere

Following on the previous post's links to the plea for academics to have a voice in the real world, I discovered an article and a blog post that makes some good points.

Chris Blattman links to an argument that "some stuff that applied academics do shouldn’t be things that are easily explained to your family at Thanksgiving". It warns against the Freakonomics-ization of Economics. Blattman writes that there are academics who do well at having a voice in the real world and who enjoy it, but "we wouldn’t want the public intellectualism to crowd out deeper research".

In an interesting article in The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman argues that

It won’t do any good, in short, to ask professors to become more populist. Academic writing and research may be knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish—but that’s because academia has become that way, too.

This is very much the South African view about why no Economics Profs are regularly writing op-eds in the Business Day - in an increasingly competitive system you have to write for colleagues, journal editors and reviewers and NRF rating panels. There is little scope (and time left in the day) for being a public intellectual.

I think that academic research and having a voice in the real word can be complements in production, but then again, I would since I'm typing this on a Sunday afternoon one of the two blogs that I try to keep going!

If your are interested in find such a voice, the Impact of Social Sciences blog at the LSE, has some good thoughts.

If you are busy with academic research, you'll be glad to know that the Development Impact blog now has a list of posts on technical topics!

The econoblogosphere

Everyone knows this is a favourite topic of mine and this week there has been links to share to interesting stories:

In the New York Times Nicholas Kristof wrote: Professors, we need you! saying amongst other things: 
Professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook.

There were quite a few responses including:

The column Nicholas Kristof should have written: "Why are economists the only professors we listen to about social and political issues?"
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) February 16, 2014

Chris Blattman posted an interview with him on how social media is shaping academia.

The New Yorker had a good article on Eric Jarosinski, the Prof behind @NeinQuarterly and how he "developed a crisp, allusive, irreverent Twitter voice: “Signifying nothing is harder than it looks.”"

Finally, John Cochrane, The Grumpy Economist, had an excellent blog on Mooconomics. He has some really good thoughts about massive open online learning. Read the whole thing.

More on publishing and social media

So I make the presentation in the previous post at the conference, but the people were not convinced. "Doing research and promoting it on social media will take too much time..."

But yesterday I read this nice post at The Monkey Cage blog on The promise and perils of sharing work in progress. Allow me to quote a bit:

Some significant part of being (viewed as) “successful” in academia is being visible to your peers.  Yes, the actual quality of your work matters more, but visibility counts for something.  In tenure decisions, departments often want evidence that you are “known” in the field.  There are lots of ways to build visibility—going to conferences, networking, etc.—but most all of them involve sharing your work, even in its early stages.

Social media is the way to go! I am going to follow the advice:

"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." –Howard Aiken
— Michael Clemens (@m_clem) September 12, 2013

Publishing, perishing and social media

I have been going on about this for a while now and this week I am taking my social media story to a conference at the Maastricht School of Management. The conference has the theme: Revolutions in education: New opportunities for development.

My point is that it is getting tough to publish. Even your local society journal wants clean identification of causal effects. The quick reply to such worries are to do better work. I argue that that is necessary, but may not be sufficient. You also need to work on your reputation for doing good work and collaborate with people who already have that reputation. It is at this point that the social web can come to the rescue.

Prof Wim Naude and I will soon launch an online survey about this. Stay tuned for some empirical results.