Jeff Holmes: belief

Transcript context

…There was definitely an inflection point. At the very beginning, when we started out, blogging was something that other academics looked down upon, turned their noses down, [laughs] “Oh, you’re just speaking to the public.” Then maybe about five years in, beginning with the start of the empirical revolution, people like theorists and the high-named people would start sending us their papers. “Could you put this on the blog?” That was a real shift in the vibe, as it were. Speaking of that, I think about different eras of Marginal Revolution but I think the first era of Marginal Revolution is ’03 to ’08. It’s the rise of new media, podcasting, and blogging, and also the rise of popular economics. A lot of the younger readers to MR may not even be aware of Freakonomics being released in 2005, and there was just this onslaught of popular economics books. Would you agree that that’s a distinct era in MR? And what are your thoughts on that time period? Yes, absolutely. I think it is part of the rise of popular economics, so we timed that well. There were the grandfathers like Steven Landsburg and people like that. Then with the Freakonomics phenomena, I remember seeing Steve Levitt on the Daily Show, and Jon Stewart was like, “Freakonomics!” Oh my God, it was very, very strange, but you knew something had changed.…

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