Matt Yglesias: belief

Transcript context

…Now, blogging was very important for your career it seems — helped you a lot. Why is it that blogging doesn’t seem like it’s coming back right now if it was useful to you, useful to me, useful to many other people? Is it Facebook? Is it Twitter? Is it something else? Why not? I think we blame Facebook and Twitter, conventionally, for it. But I don’t think that it’s necessarily just about the technological modes. Part of why blogging was such an interesting moment was that it introduced a genuine disruption into the ecosystem, and that people who, early on, were not affiliated with important institutions or necessarily well known, by colonizing the open space became a big deal in our own little niches. Twitter has had some of that impact, right? There are smart, good people who’ve come to public attention through their ability to tweet, which is good, right? That’s a strong thing. But I don’t think if you brought blogging back, it wouldn’t be blogging in that sense, right? People would want to read the blogs of famous people or the blogs that had big brands behind them, or the New York Times would own blogging or something. Whereas what was special about that blog moment in its first decade was the extent to which people who we didn’t know would just write stuff and become influential. What did you learn from Paul Joskow, the famous economist and also your uncle?…

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