Marginal Revolution’s Most Popular Posts from 2011
1. College has been oversold. It’s hard to explain which posts go viral but this post, based on material from my e-book Launching the Innovation Renaissance, was a monster generating over 500 comments, 3000 likes and 800 tweets. The follow-up on puppeteerring in a wintry economic climate was also popular although not in the top ten.
2. Teacher’s Don’t Like Creative Students. Another monster with fewer page views than #1 but over 3000 likes and nearly 4000 tweets!
3. Philosophy Referee Signals.
4. Be Safe Break the Law, on the 55mph speed limit.
5. Possible progress in medicine, a link-post from Tyler noting a new drug that can kill many viruses.
6. What is quirky about the United States? A question from Tyler that generated many comments.
7. The Mexican Mafia another of mine that went viral with links from Time, Instapundit and Reddit.
8. World Income Equality a graph showing how poor Americans are richer than rich Indians.
9. Explaining France, a post from Tyler explaining, well you know.
10. Common mistakes of right wing and market economists, a nice meaty post from Tyler, just a little bit more popular than Common mistakes of left-wing economists.
A few other notable posts in the top 25 were my posts on cities, India’s Voluntary City and Cities as Hotels, Tyler’s post on the S&P downgrade, my post on The Fruits of Immigration, which was mostly just quotations but I worked hard on the final line which many people then linked to, and my post on The Great Male Stagnation.
Several posts from previous years continued to be popular. What Happened to M. Night Shyamalan? from 2010 was again popular this year probably because Slate expanded the idea into a feature called Hollywood’s Career-O-Matic.
The importance of writing a good title is shown by Tyler’s 2007 posts Why did the Soviet Union fall? and How many children should you have? neither of which generated many comments but both of which show up early in Google searches of precisely these questions. My 2008 post What is New Trade Theory? on Krugman’s Nobel may also continue to attract attention for this reason.
2012 here we come!