EconLog has had good guest bloggers. Eric Crampton did it at one time, he can now be found at Offsetting Behaviour. David Henderson was supposed to be a guest but became permanent, and while his content tends to rather generic libertarianism (with perhaps some extra emphasis on pacifism and the rare detour into monetarism) I’m glad of his presence due to the store of anecdotes he’s accumulated in his time, and his thoroughgoing Canadian niceness which contrasted with bitter former co-blogger Arnold Kling (and fellow Canuck Steve Williamson come to think of it). Garrett Jones was one of those people on Twitter who needed to start a regular blog, and had some good stuff, but I was disappointed that he often brought up Real Business Cycle stories when he himself had earlier explained how RBC no longer fits the “stylized facts” of the economy. More recently Alberto Mingardi and Art Carden joined, with both mostly serving up generic libertarianism without necessarily much economic content. Distributed Republic is no more (when trying to read an old post I got an exceeded bandwidth notice, not sure if anything changed to cause that), but I’m sure there are plenty of other generic libertarian sites they could contribute to. As it is they don’t seem to be part of the same econblog “conversation” I expect from the site. It’s almost enough to make me miss Kling, since his fondness for persisting in views he knew to have negligible supporting evidence at least got him in some arguments with other bloggers. Almost.
August 26, 2013
Entitled to an Opinion 
December 12, 2013 at 6:18 am
I can’t believe you like Henderson more than Kling. Henderson has hardly ever said anything interesting. I found Arnold’s posts consistently the best on Econlog (although Caplan is sometimes interesting, it’s usually bad-interesting rather than good-interesting).
December 12, 2013 at 8:08 pm
I think Henderson has relayed some good stories, and also did a compelling defense (with Jeffrey Rogers Hummel) of Alan Greenspan against George Selgin. I find it ironic that Arnold Kling started a new blog with the tag-line “taking the most charitable view of those who disagree”, because I consistently found him among the least charitable of disputants, the sort of person likely to do worst on an Ideological Turing Test. I suppose I evaluate that bunch by the degree to which they resemble Robin Hanson, and while Caplan falls short Kling seems even further away.