Blogs versus Scholarship

Dani Rodrik reports on the relationship between high impact bloggers and high impact scholarship.

One explanation for the results might be that the blog offers an outlet for scholars who find it difficult to publish in the high impact journals the opportunity to have an intellectual impact.

What explanation would you give?

Comments

[Rafe Champion]

At first sight Dani's graph looks like a classic plum pudding but if you look hard you can see the correlation:) Two categories of people are missing from the data: high impact academics who don't blog and bloggers who have no Ph D. Does anyone know whether there are many people in the first of those two categories?

The question that has to be asked from the Austrian point of view is how many of the data points are occupied by people who are stuck in the kind of formalism that Pete has critiqued.
http://economics.gmu.edu/pboettke/pubs/articles/boettke-cr.pdf

[Daniel J. D'Amico]

I wonder what the trend would look like if he controlled for age. Old guys as famous as Becker and Posner have nothing to loose everything to gain by blogging. The less-famous old guys probably face uncertain rewards and high start up costs because they aren't willing to spend the time and effort to set up the website and maintain it.

For young people the skills of blogging come more intuitively. We can expect younger scholars to have blogs across the board, whereas older bloggers are a biased sample.

Blogging isn't a substitute for scholarly work but it can be a complement. In fact it's probably a different good altogether. You write scholarly publications for the profession and you blog to communicate to the outside world. If younger generations have the computer skills to do the latter more easily, it could result in a profession that more openly communicates with the ordinary person. It's not a sufficient criteria of scholarship but will it become a necessary criteria for being an active scholar? Let's hope so.