This page has been migrated from an earlier version of this site. Links and images may be broken.
It’s never pleasant to find out bad things about yourself, and I just did.
I occasionally go over to Marginal Revolution, a weblog run by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen. They are very pro-free-market economics lecturers and the weblog attracts a lot of libertarian capitalist types: obviously I disagree with them on just about everything. I post the odd comment – usually just a short dig at something they say – and then I go again.
So yesterday morning, just before going to work, I took a look, and Alex Tabarrok had just posted a piece on Le problème du pain, asking “why bread isn’t nearly as good in the United States as in Paris”. It’s a problem a little bit like why beer was bad in Britain for so long, which is something I recently wrote about. The piece I wrote is called Learning By Drinking, and its point of view is pretty much the opposite of most of those at Marginal Revolution, including Alex T. I was one of the early commenters in the thread, and I put a link to my own piece in my comment. No big deal.
But then Alex Tabarrok added a comment to the thread, and said this [emphasis added]:
… Combined with Tom’s comments about well-informed consumes and the lemons problem (do read his longer post) I think this could get us somewhere … > >
And with that, all kinds of people came over to my site looking at the piece in question. As I mentioned just the other day, this is a quiet corner of the Internets, getting a handful of visitors each day. But all of a sudden I got 100 visitors yesterday and another 100 or so today, all thanks to Alex Tabarrok. And traffic, where weblogs are concerned, is a Good Thing.
Now I like to think I’m more open minded than these pro-market types, but here is Alex T. sending people my way from his far more popular site to read a piece that he probably disagrees with. And I would not have thought to send people his way without a little dig at whatever it was they wrote. So it begins to look as if he is more open minded and generous than I am. Which obviously can’t be the case because he is on the other side of the political fence from me.
I guess I have to face it. I owe Alex T. a thank you. Come on, you can do it….
“Thank you Alex Tabarrok for recommending people to my web site.”
There. Not too bad. Now off to eat some humble pie.