How Giles Wilkes learned to love the economics blogosphere

This possibly gated but excellent nonetheless piece is from the FT, here is one excerpt:

A few weeks ago was typical. After some time off, my feed aggregator displayed 794 blog posts, 56 of them foolishly filed into the “must read” folder. Here lay a polemic blasting the FT for worrying about China’s debts; there a graph strewn post about US inflation expectations. Virtuoso “infovore” Tyler Cowen had dug up a fascinating passage on how China runs monetary policy. Another polymath, Brad DeLong (former Clinton staffer and tireless scourge of rightwing bunkum), had spent some minutes producing a few hundred words on “the intellectual role of the economist in public life”, throwing out references to pre-Christian philosopher Hermippos of Smyrna as a warm-up. Another writer, an anonymous retired trader with a bad back, explained how quantitative easing exposes central bankers as a bunch of bungling frauds. It felt like his fifth such post in a week.

And so on…

And yet in 10 years of trying to make sense of the economic world around me, I have found nothing as reliably good as the blogosphere.

And so on!  How can you not love an article that refers to an “omni-reading angel in the celestial library”?

There is a hat tip to Scott Sumner and a nice appreciation of Steve Randy Waldman as well.