Another Excellent Blog Hits the Dust

Mankiw is a Professor of Economics at Harvard. He started a blog as a way of helping his students in ec 10.

After a few weeks, however, the existence of this blog became more widely known, and the readership started to grow. One day last week, more than 20,000 visitors stopped by. This is now one of the top economics blogs, and it is one of the few that are free of advertising. The blog is sometimes even quoted in the mainstream media (such as in this recent NY Times article). All that is gratifying, but it is also time-consuming. In addition to this blog, I have classes to teach, students to advise, papers to write, textbooks to update, and three children to raise. Oh, yeah, my wife likes to see me now and then, too. It is fair to say that among all those activities, this blog ranks as my last priority.

So he disabled the comments facility and I presume will blog much less. Like other academics before, he discovered that blogosphere fame is useless at best and exposition to blogosphere stinging insects if harmful or fatal at worst. I started this blog as a way of promoting my consulting business. No business ever found its way to me through it. The only reason to maintain it now is the Roots section, the Ecce Homo of Arthur Koestler. To leave a note in the stone: That I have been here.