How agreeable are econ bloggers?
Leigh Caldwell offers up some data:
Surprisingly (at least to me), economics bloggers are more
agreeable than not. "Agree" articles (category 3) showed up more than
twice as often as "disagree" (category 4). When measured by titles, the
trend is not so clear, with a majority "agree" articles (category 1)
when measured over the last two months but more "disagree" (category 2)
when taking the last 7 days alone.
So far, so good and indeed Leigh is a smart fellow to see the truth of that. There is, however, a villain in the piece and dear reader it is you:
However, blog readers are
not so magnanimous. On the content measure, the mean number of comments
on an "is right" article (category 3) is 3.66, while there are an
average of 6 comments on an "is wrong" article (category 4).
When
the title filter is used, the difference is even greater: there are no
comments at all on the category 1 ("genius") articles, and an average
of 21.6 on category 2 ("idiot")!
Are bloggers simply nicer people than readers? (Or should I say "all you idiots"?) How would blog comments change if they were attached to your real name like glue and came up any time someone googled the commentator? Which of us is the real human, the blog reader or the blog writer?
Ben Casnocha theorizes as to which is the most natural "you."