It goes without saying that blogs are gaining in popularity, as evidenced recently by the appearance of two new blogs by individuals who have greatly impacted the benefits world. While they will obviously not be blogging about benefits, readers will undoubtedly want to visit now and then:
- Eliot Spitzer has started a blog in conjunction with his announcement that he is running for Governor.
- Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner has started a blog here which will “explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format.” In his first post, Posner writes about blogging in general:
Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.