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Wow, I am honored and flattered to be included in the NY Times Sunday Magazine Year in Ideas, under the header “D.I.Y. Macroeconomics” (text version here). Cited as well were Calculated Risk and Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis.
Here is the relevant excerpt:
D.I.Y. Macroeconomics
Until recently, the economics profession largely controlled the production, dissemination and interpretation of economic data. Now there’s a new trend afoot: do-it-yourself macroeconomics, in which ordinary citizens pull apart the data and come to their own conclusions.
The democratization of economics owes much to the financial crisis that first hit in 2007. That ongoing catastrophe, which few economists predicted, tarnished the profession’s reputation, prompting some to look elsewhere for answers. They turned to – where else? – the Internet, where vast amounts of economic data that had once been hidden from public view were now online. Sites like FRED, maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, enabled anyone with a connection to the Web to download data on everything from local home-price indexes to credit-card balances to weekly fluctuations in diesel prices.
At the same time, a growing army of knowledgeable “econo-bloggers” began analyzing the data available online. Strikingly, many of the authors of these blogs – the brains behind the Big Picture, Calculated Risk, Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis and others – aren’t academic economists but people with real-world experience in financial markets. Their Web sites offer sophisticated interpretations of economic data and hold passionate debates with their readers over the merits of the data. As a result, economic data that were formerly greeted with grudging acceptance by the public – the latest unemployment figures, for example – are now the catalyst for endless popular exegeses. -Stephen Mihm
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I actually missed that on my own; thank you for everyone who emailed me this weekend!
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