ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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I'm not a fan of MR because it doesn't seem like an economics blog to me. MR is a lot like Freakonomics and I don't think Freakonomics was about economics. It's about interesting statistics and trivia, but there is very little economics on it. This post on early intervention is an example. What does it have to do with economics? And what economics MR occasionally mentions often promotes bad theory.
MR is sometimes more theoretical. TC once did a walk through Keynes's GT, which of course made every Austrian commenter's head explode with every post. Particularly the one which went, IIRC, "and with that Austrian capital theory falls off the map".
If you are not at least open to views outside your pet school of thought, then MR will frequently promote "bad economics", esp. since TC doesn't stay within one school.
EconLog is not quite Austrian either; Kling is the most sympathetic but he rejects some elements, preferring a neoclassical approach to institutionalism (as Acemoglu, etc. do it). Caplan is famously neoclassical and Henderson is non-theoretical on the blog. But since EconLog generally picks fights with the left rather than the right, commenters don't notice as much.
A case in point: look at MR's list of top articles for the year. Only 3 out of 12 are about economics. I would think that you ought to have half your articles be about economics for you to be considered an econ blog.
I don't mind MR posting heterodox economics. As david wrote, none of the writer for this blog are Austrian. Caplan rarely deals with economic issues, so I don't care. But Kling and Henderson often come to the same conclusions as Austrian econ. But MR doesn't just post differing views; he supports bad economic theory and attacks good theory when he occasionally posts about economics.
Austrian econ isn't my "pet" school. That suggests an irrational, emotional attachment. I earned my MA in Keynesian/neoclassical econ. However, the school's biggest mistake was allowing me to take a class in development economics where I found that a whole lot of what they taught in macro was just flat wrong. Much later I learned Austrian econ. I promote Austrian econ because I think it best describes how economies work. Other theories are just wrong.