05 noviembre 2007

La economía de los blogs

Al hilo de que el economista de Harvard Greg Mankiw decidiera cerrar los comentarios de su exitoso blog por falta de tiempo, se han publicado un par de análisis sobre lo que podríamos llamar "economía de los blogs". El problema que se plantea es si le merece la pena a un excelente profesor dedicar tiempo a su blog - del que a priori no obtiene ningún beneficio racional - en vez de centrarse en aquello que realmente es bueno - investigar, elaborar material docente, impartir clases, etc-. Si uno de los fundamentos del mercado es que cada uno debe dedicarse a aquellas tareas en las que tiene ventaja comparativa respecto al resto de personas - y cobrar por ello, claro- y no perder el tiempo en aquellas tareas en las que no se es competitivo, entonces la conclusión parece obvia: abandonemos los blogs... ¿o no?

¿Abandonar? No, por Dani Rodrik, colega de Mankiw en Harvard:
As the smartest economist-bloggers become more popular, they will spend increasing amounts of time working on their blogs, steadily raising their opportunity costs without producing much if any income, until at some point logging becomes, well, uneconomical: "So if economists with high opportunity costs of time start to get out, shall we have a lemons problem on our hands? Will eventually the only prolific bloggers remain the ones that are not worth reading?" Does, in other words, the economics of blogging guarantee that only the mediocre and the worthless will survive - the ones whose time isn't particularly valuable to begin with?
¿Abandonar? , claro, por Nicholas Carr:
Because blogging is such a personal pursuit, with strong and immediate ego-rewards, it can be irrationally seductive, particularly to highly competitive overachievers. The hazard - and this applies as well to disciplines beyond economics - is that extraordinarily talented individuals may end up, like lab mice drinking sugar water, spending more time blogging than they should, even though their comparative advantage is smaller in blogging than it is elsewhere. Distorted by noneconomic but nonetheless powerful rewards, the idea market would become less efficient than it should be, and we'd all suffer as a result.
¿Abandonar? Sí pero no, en Free Exchange de The Economist:
But I think it's quite possible that their advantage in blogging is not at all as great as their advantage in producing world class research. There might then be gains from trade. Very good economists could produce very good research, and tolerable bloggers could analyse and blog about that research for those interested in reading about economics, and all would benefit. In fact, I believe that if one looks at the whole distribution of economics bloggers and academic economists, the share of economics bloggers doing academic economics is not that large, and the share of academic economists blogging is smaller still.
Which isn't to say that I wish any academic economists to leave off blogging--there is value in smart writing not meant for journal publication.

En fin, para qué les voy a negar que en más de una ocasión uno no ha pensado en abandonar esto...

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