Modeled Behavior was snubbed by Time Magazine. No matter, they’ll have another chance to get the list right.
A few of my favorite or most read blogs.
- I read Calculated Risk with my morning coffee. I assume many people do. You can’t live with out the charts. Its sidebar is also a good place to see whether there is something new up at Econbrowser or Macroblog.
- Paul Krugman is where I turn immediately when I have a spare moment. Krugman makes quick and dirty points that are at a minimum interesting and often compelling. Its one of the most compact reads.
- Matt Yglesias. I catch almost every post here. Even though I know the point he is going to make on many issues the framing is always interesting.
- Econolog tops the list when I sit down to “read blogs.” Its rare that I won’t find some out of the mainstream argument backed by reason, evidence or both. This is the stuff of intellectual fun.
- Overcoming Bias. There is no blogger that regularly readjusts my thinking as often as Robin Hanson.
- Will Wilkinson’s various outlets are wordsmith candy. When I crave blogging as art, I know where to go.
- Mark Thoma is where I turn when I am in information junkie mode. If its worth reading chances are its there.
- The Atlantic is my second spot for brain food. I am not just saying that because I don’t want to split up McArdle, Fallows and Sullivan. I typically browse the Atlantic as a full package.
- I usually find my way to Marginal Revolution but honestly I find most of the posts too short. I want to hear more. It often feels as if I am being teased a bit there.
- Free Exchange is might be the best place for getting a solid take on what’s going on right now, without straying to far from blog-nerdery.
Modeled Behavior 
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Tuesday ~ March 8th, 2011 at 12:44 am
Brett
EconLog is definitely an odd one. I’ve added and dropped it multiple times over my time as a Google Feed reader.
I dropped McArdle mostly because her writing just didn’t intrigue me after a while. I dropped Andrew Sullivan because the guy produces a ton of posts – too many. I wasn’t too fond of looking away from my screen for two minutes only to find out that another 37 Sully posts had come through on my feed.
I agree that Cowen teases at Marginal Revolution. His comment threads tend to be pretty interesting, though.
Robin Hansen is another one that I dropped after a while. I think he’s just too far into the whole “singularitarian/futurism” thing for me to stay interested. He also tended to have way too much unfounded speculation on various things for me to take him seriously on a lot of his posts.
I stopped reading Mark Thoma for the same reason I stopped reading Brad DeLong after a while. Too many of his posts basically consist of either Linkspam or long citations of other people’s material, and that gets boring after a while.
Calculated Risk is great because of the charts, as you pointed out.
Tuesday ~ March 8th, 2011 at 1:04 am
Jeff
“Modeled Behavior was snubbed by Time Magazine.”
For what it’s worth, I consider many of your posts to be among the clearest and most thought-provoking expositions of macroeconomic / monetary theory I’ve found anywhere. For simply building up an understanding of how macroeconomists think about those issues, you’re the best. It’s quite a valuable service, and I appreciate it. I also appreciate the way you integrate the data with your arguments in those posts.
Tuesday ~ March 8th, 2011 at 6:21 am
Zenobia
Ugh, who cares about Time anyway! They’re largely pulp at this point, Newsweek is the one at least trying to stay serious.
Tuesday ~ March 8th, 2011 at 8:06 am
Schismatism
“For what it’s worth, I consider many of your posts to be among the clearest and most thought-provoking expositions of macroeconomic / monetary theory I’ve found anywhere.”
^ this blog is great for laymen who want to be spoken to like an adult without being made to feel like an uneducated idiot.
Tuesday ~ March 8th, 2011 at 11:02 pm
LT3
I agree with all your recommendations except for Krugman and Yglesias, who I feel are way out of place on a list like that.
The vast majority of Yglesias’ posts contain almost zero additional information or insight, they typically consist of several paragraphs worth of quotes, followed by Yglesias summarizing them, and then briefly commenting “I think [author so-and-so] is right on this one” or a similarly pithy comment. The rest of his posts are usually along the lines of “Look how dumb and unqualified Palin/ Republican candidate X is”, or “Libertarians are racist and wish the South had won the civil war”. His partisanship and bias are extremely obvious, he consciously chooses to avoid stories that paint Obama in a negative light (particularly about detainee treatment, the attitude towards civil liberties by the Obama DOJ, Bradley Manning, etc), the type he would certainly hype and draw attention to under a McCain presidency. His editorial independence is definitely compromised.
Krugman certainly does bring his own content to the table, along with a viewpoint which is hard to find elsewhere, and is worth reading. But his mischaracterization of the conservative/republican viewpoint (often intentional) makes it hard to take him seriously. To hear him say it, there were no legitimate arguments against the Obama healthcare legislation, and everyone who opposed it was simply a greedy bastard who hated the thought of being forced to subsidize someone else’s healthcare. Part of being an intellectual or academic involves presenting the opposing viewpoint in as effective a manner as possible (which I am sure he is intelligent enough to do if he wished), or at the very least not going out of your way to create a misleading image of it. He also is a member of the “insult libertarians by labeling them as racists/ pro-slavery” strawman club.