A “Thank You”, battling my worse nature

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Author

Tom Slee

Published

March 21, 2006

Note

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.