Dear reader,
this morning a tweet by Dirk Elsner (@blicklog) showed that he was still moved by the "Bruegel controversy" and in a remarkable new blog entry (ger) he defended the European blogs once more but conceded that Bruegel had at least one point when they say that there is a lack of interconnection between authors.
Mr Elsner is right to defend the efforts of all the fine men and women who are offering the public their views, analysis and even some provocations as food for thought. The author here also likes the challenge of reading many different points of view since the current crisis of the common European currency doesn't offer a single or easy or even known solution.
In order to add some new perspective to the ongoing discussion let me say that the criticism of Bruegel also has some truth by exposing the just emerging ability of some highly respected economists to use the possibilities of direct communication to the reader by using tools like Twitter or blogs. While in the past they either had to depend and to rely on publishers who did the 'dirty work' for them. Some of the professors could concentrate on their science and from time to time could publish their work by sending it to their publishers. Be it in order to release a new book or just a newspaper article. Since the crisis in the eurozone hardly give anyone the time to respond to it in form of a book we see many newspapers who are keen to release the views of the most respected economists from all over Europe and nowadays we even see central bankers while still on their post to release their point of view and their explanations for their actions to the public.
This is quite a new phenomena and while some economists already know how to use Twitter and/or blogs others are just now making their entry to the 'new world'. So it was quite a premiere to see our central bank president on the telly answering a lot of questions and preparing the Dutch pensioners for some cuts in their pensions.
Special: Klaas Knot about the euro crisis (dut) +(video)
Some others use Twitter in combination with newspaper articles they wrote, while some made the 'big step' to use both Twitter and a blog to publish all by themselves. So professor @WhelanKarl (Ireland) made his impressive entrance into the new world by using both, just as Professor Yanis Varoufakis (Greece) uses also both: his blog and his Twitter account (@yanisvaroufakis) for some time now., while others like professor Mariana Mazzucato, UK (@MazzucatoM) just discovered Twitter and had some beginners difficulties in the use of it and for now uses links to existing pieces in e.g. newspapers. Professor Paul de Grauwe, Belgium (@pdegrauwe) also uses Twitter in combination with some of his pieces published in newspapers
The occurring beginners difficulties might also explain why not all known major economists have joined the internet 'debate club' already, since some technical skills have to get aquired in order to manage the new tools. Although nowadays blogs like the service offered by Google (blogger.com) come along with many functions making things easy they still have some features of formatting, structure which need at least some time to adjust to. Since most of economists have a very tight schedule already it is understandable that not all want to use their scarce & precious time to find out how that blog thing works. Even taking care of the right formatting and shape of a text needs some additional attention. It's just more work than just send a piece to the publisher who takes care of the rest. The reward however is that it can published right away, even in the middle of the night, and a direct response by the recipient is possible. (Also here the requirement of knowing how to allow access for comments)
There are those who use the platform and given structure of newspaper blog like Martin Wolf or Paul Krugman where it can be assumed that those authors don't have to get into the details of technical stuff in order to make their blog readable. It also offers of course a much broader readership right from the beginning since those newspapers are already providing services to the desired audience for many years.
Whatever means those fine men & women are using it is welcomed as a contribution to a better understanding of very complex matters which are even a tough nut to crack for our politicians & central bankers. We would like to see more interaction between all these economists and some more even controversial debates like the one between Karl Whelan and Hans-Werner Sinn (albeit indirectly in this case) but also the possible interaction with others by adding comments to blog entries. Maybe it is a wise thing for students to take their professors who did not yet make the step into the Internet blogging community by the hand and help them create their own blog. At least the setup could be done by some more technically skilled 'pioneers' and from there things are much easier to post.
Maybe Bruegel blog has a point that those in the US started earlier and therefore had more time to discover the new means of communication and interaction (a sarcastic remark would be that they had their crisis with need for more communication some 3 years earlier) but Europe is learning fast and will overcome the 'communication gap'. As mentioned before some completely new events like a live TV appearance of a sitting central banker occurred why should it not be possible that more inhabitants of scientific ivory towers open their doors to the public. At least the brave ones among them will not hesitate to risk even a confrontation with some other former inhabitants of ivory towers.
That is also one point the author here thinks he discovered in the criticism of the 'Bruegel provocation' that they actually didn't want to attack the broad community of all men & women blogging on economy but they might have targeted more in the direction of the 'top brass' of economists. Maybe they had (as Kantoos (@KantoosEcon) put it) Hans-Werner Sinn, "the European Krugman", in mind.
In general the author here can agree almost in full with the comments made by Kantoos only one additional remark would be that there are already exchanges also on the Internet like voxeu.org which are highly recommended.
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