Dani Rodrik’s pessimistic post on the future of economics blogosphere – and his subsequent correction – left me a bit bemused. By my current reckoning – and I will be thrilled if someone can correct me – the Canadian economics blogosphere consists of two members: me and John Palmer at Eclecticon. A Canadian Econoview seems to have – to my great distress – gone dark. And while I welcome and strongly encourage students such as Stackelberg Follower (again, if there are any others, I’d be more than pleased to learn about what I’ve been missing), they run the very real risk of having better things to do with their time than blog – like writing a thesis and getting tenure.
So before I start worrying about people leaving the economics blogosphere, I’d like to see more people from this side of the border entering it. Even if we apply the usual factor-of-ten rule for US-Canada comparisons, two is far too small a number compared to that of US economics bloggers. It’s even too small compared to the number of economics bloggers in Australia, which has two-thirds the population of Canada.
In my very first blog post, I had an explanation for the low profile of Canadian academic economists. I don’t see any reason to revise it:
The Canadian economics community is pretty small, so academic and
public-sector economists know each other fairly well. Government
economists are people we’ve met at conferences, people we’ve gone to
graduate school with, or (more and more frequently for me) people we’ve
had as students. We don’t need to mount a public relations campaign in
order to get a sympathetic hearing at the Department of Finance or the
Bank of Canada.Three of the most important policy initiatives that have been
implemented by the federal government during my career are the
FTA/NAFTA, the adoption of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), and the
Bank of Canada’s decision to adopt inflation targets. None of these
policies can be characterised as a being a response to popular opinion:
they all had their origins in the interactions between academic and
public-sector economists. Even if this process has had the effect of
producing good policy outcomes, the disconnect between how policies are
made and what is being discussed in public is not healthy in a
democracy.Academic economists play an important role in developing Canadian
public policy, and we have a commensurately important obligation to try
to explain them as best as we can to the non-economist public.
Update: Wishes do come true! Not long after I posted this, Underground Economics popped up.
Now I wish I someone would give me $100m. And a pony.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
I agree it is too bad about CanadianEconoview.
I also agree it would be nice to have some more Cdn. content in the econ blogosphere. I remember what a great breath of fresh air it was to discover this blog after a few months of reading US blogs exclusively.
I hope you keep up the good fight Prof. Gordon. You can always hope that gov’t economists will stop listening to you guys, giving your colleagues reason to take their views to the masses…
Thanks for continuing your blog. Please keep it going!
(This one http://truedough.blogspot.com/ seems to have gone dead as well, unfortunately.)
what about relentlessly progressive economics? Perhaps not your political cup of tea, but a vibrant Canadian econoblog nonetheless.
http://www.progressive-economics.ca/relentless/
Although I’m not unsympathetic to many of their policy goals, they’re not really a source for independent commentary. They’re an advocacy group.
I kinda thought that about Canadian Econoview sometimes; advocacy, but perhaps not a group. Point taken though, but I do enjoy polemicists.
You don’t think your explanation for the low public profile of Canadian economists might apply to Australians too? (Probably a bit less, admittedly: my guess is more Oz academics do the last bit of their education abroad than is true of Canadian academics, while that’s not so true of policymakers/financial market types.) If you look at the Australian econblogs, there’s a lot of stuff about their links outside academia.)
There was another Canadian econ student blog – Liberalism without Cynicism – but it was fairly US politics centric and has just gone dark for thesis finishing reasons I gather.
I don’t really consider myself a blogger and I can’t really discuss Canadian stuff too much since my site is international and owned by About.com/New York Times. But I am a Canadian and I live in beautiful London, Ontario.
Overall, though, there’s a distinct lack of us, unless you count Canadian ex-pats working at U.S. schools.
Some thoughts on your thoughtful post…
There’s also a lack of Canadian financial blogs. (the only one I know is http://www.wellingtonfund.com/blog/)
One reason there are so many economics blogs is because of the GMU economists (marginal revolution, econlib, cafe hayek). It seems to have become custom amongst them to keep blogs. There isn’t that sort of tradition with any other Canadian university (at least not to my knowledge).
A lot of the good economics blogs are team efforts. (Tabarrok & Cowen, Hamilton & Chin, Kling & Hamilton). This means they pump out an article or two a day. The more articles the more traffic and comments, and the more traffic the more competing blogs pop up. This is something that your blog and the other Canadian blogs (except for prog economics which has many writers)could probably benefit from (I know how much effort it can be to keep up a blog).
I too miss Canadian Econoview and truedough’s blog. I understand that blogging is time consuming, and with scarce resources…. 😦
For what it is worth, as an American I enjoy this blog both for its economic posts in general and for its informed insight on Canada’s economy. I hope you keep things going, and also hope you can persuade others to join the loonie economics club.
EclectEcon: At Least the Second-Best Economics Blog in Canada
Stephen Gordon, of Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, laments that there are only two economics blogs still going in Canada: his and EclectEcon. That means …
I would appreciate if you could provide some links to the estimates of personal income distribution in Canada like those available through the US Census Bureau, i.e. obtained in predefined income bins and age dependent.
As an input to study macroeconomic variables in Canada.
Exact prediction of inflation and unemployment in Canada
Ivan O. Kitov
Abstract
Potential links between inflation and unemployment in Canada have been examined. No consistent Phillips curve has been found likely due to strong changes in monetary policy of the Bank of Canada. However, there were two distinct periods where linear links between inflation and unemployment could exist – before 1983 and after 1983. A linear and lagged relationship between inflation, unemployment and labor force has been obtained for Canada. Similar relationships were reported previously for the USA, Japan, France and Austria. Changes in labor force level are simultaneously reflected in unemployment and lead inflation by two years. Therefore this generalized relationship provides a two-year ahead natural prediction of inflation based on current estimates of labor force level and unemployment rate. The goodness-of-fit for the relationship is of 0.7 for the period since 1965, i.e. including the periods of high inflation and disinflation.
Click to access MPRA_paper_5015.pdf
May I suggest that the lack of Canadian econoblogs is due to the fact that, well, compared to the USA, we are well run? I mean, come on, Brad DeLong has to end every other post with “Impeach George Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.”
Check out undergroundecon.blogspot.com, it’s a new blog about Canadian and American economics
Well, that is good news! Welcome!
A couple more hypotheses regarding why there are so many more U.S. economics blogs than Canadian ones.
(1) The U.S. tradition of liberal arts education means that there is a great deal more appreciation of interdisciplinary inquiry in the United States. I used to be a big fan of the higher degree of concentration within a major field of study at Canadian universities, relative to the U.S.. But now that I’ve spent 13 years down south, I’m not so sure. There just seems to be a higher degree of intellectual curiosity here. History is a great example. It seems that every American who has been through post-secondary education retains an undying interest in American history, but in Canada, there is virtually no interest at all, as far as I can tell. (Lending credence to Yann Martel’s remark about Canada being like a hotel. You don’t need to know much about who built your hotel room.)
(2) The decentralized nature of politics and influence here means that there is a greater utility of grass roots movements here, which in turn, nourishes the blogosphere in general. In Canada, because the legislative and executive branches are one and the same, if you cannot catch the interest of the PMO, you’re wasting your time In the U.S., however, a economic or political idea can start from anywhere.