Here is Arnold Kling of EconLog discussing the best way to learn economics today. (Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason and a New York Times columnist.)
According to Tyler Cowen, it’s right here. He says … that right now blogs are the best place to learn economics.
Probably not if your goal is to pass the exam.
But it’s an interesting thought. He is implying that it’s more worthwhile to drop in on a conversation among economists than to work through a textbook.
I think of an analogy with Yoga. For a lot of people, Yoga is a class in stretching. But people who are really into it see it as a spiritual endeavor or a path to higher consciousness. … Tyler is a real Yogi when it comes to economics. People who are looking for a guru can sit at his feet (i.e., read his blog or his new book) and gain wisdom.
While I still say you can’t get any better than Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, blogs add instant analysis, the freshness of current events, and a practicality often hard to find in curves and slopes on a graph. They bring the “economic way of thinking”of the seen and unseen–the true heart of the dismal science– to the rest of us, by forcing economists to write well for normal human beings.
To be widely read, bloggers, economic or otherwise, must explain things in clear, concise, interesting, and novel ways, and thus more in the Austrian style of qualitative analysis without the frequently-confusing, perhaps-false, and often-obscuring precision of math. This is, perhaps not coincidentally, also the style of Hazlitt, of whom H.L. Mencken said, “he [was] one of the few economists in human history who could really write.” With all the interesting economics blogs around these days, are blogs making economists better writers? Or did economists just lack the proper forum, audience, and incentives for such exposition before?
Either way, anything that increases economic literacy, especially in an election year, sounds good to me, and I know that I have personally improved my understanding from blogs. However, what should schools and academic publishers think about blogs being, according to a tenured professor, the best place to learn economics?
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