The value of blogging

Yes, I know, blogging about blogging (or as it is known, meta-blogging). But I do actually think there's something rather remarkable going on out there in the world of economics blogs just at the moment. We've just had the financial part of the economy fall over and of course we'd all like to know why and more importantly, how do we make sure that having fallen over it doesn't leave us with another Depression?

The answer there of course means that we want to know why the '29 crash did indeed lead to the Depression: then at least we'd know what not to do.

You may not be all that surprised to hear that there are a number of different views about this. Try here, here and here.

These (all rather good) economists are running through what they think were the causes and what ended the problems in time. OK, great, people have been doing that sort of thing for centuries, chewing over peoblems, offering ideas, seeing them striken down by others and generally, in the end, we get from the intellectual back and forth an answer which we can be reasonably sure of.

But what's happening here is rather different. Not in content, but in speed. Instead of it all happening at the speed of an academic journal (which is slightly above glacial) or even a weekly or monthly political or economic magazine, this is happening almost in real time. One theory gets put up in the morning and by dinner time some hundreds of knowledgeable and enquiring minds have taken it to pieces and start to either accept or refute it. And post about their acceptance or refutation which starts the whole cycle off once again.

This is science of course: put up a theory and then everyone tries to disprove it and if they can then you start again with a new theory. In the end you hope that you'll end up with one that no one can disprove and which you can then take as the basis of a course of action.

It's just that what heartens me so much watching this going on is the speed with which it is happening. We might even get to a decent theory and thus course of action in time to actually do something sensible and that would rather be a first for economic science.