One Reason Why I Blog

A friend asked today, "Why is there no one seriously critiquing the Gates Foundation's priorities?" Given the influence that "Gates" has on the setting of public health priorities, as well as the massive sums spent, these priorities need to be critically examined. For example, I've heard on the grapevine that one reason the Ellison Fund left the area of global health is because Gates moved in--they simply couldn't compete. Unfortunately, Ellison had a lot of experience and a very different approach than does Gates, so certain approaches to public health have been closed off.

I know there are a lot of public health workers who think the Gates' money could be better spent, but you would have a hard time finding them, particularly on the internet. One explanation, of several or many*, is that those who work in public health aren't engaging the public, particularly on the internet.

Ezra Klein notes a similar phenomenon with liberal economists' absence on the internet:

Was talking to a friend last night about the impressive overrepresentation of libertarian economists in the blogosphere, and complaining that, given the massive numbers of lefty economists, my side's intellectual firepower was being reserved for office hours. For instance: A few weeks back, David Brooks massively misrepresented the positions of Lawrence Katz, a former Clinton administration economist and current Harvard professor. I'd read a bit of Katz and noticed the discrepancy, so I gave him a call and convinced him to let me set the record straight. What astonished me, however, was that Katz himself had no interest in challenging Brooks' distortions. It sucked, to be sure, but he had things to do, and why dwell? That the nation's most popular op-ed page was misinforming Americans on the inequality debate was a shame, but whaddayagonnado?

Well, Katz could have written an op-ed of his own. Or written a piece for The Prospect. Or started a blog, as his right-leaning colleague Greg Mankiw has done. But he did none of those things: He was, if not content, then willing to allow his Clinton bona fides and Harvard-conferred authority to be used to distort the debate -- that there was a responsibility to make sure his name and affiliations were to be used for good, not evil, didn't seem to enter the equation. The public sphere wasn't his sphere, and if he was going to be misrepresented in it, there wasn't much to be done.

I hadn't thought much about why it is that, say, the George Mason University economics department has decided en masse to take up blogging. My understanding from others is that, so much as I like Tyler and Bryan and all the rest, their libertarian outpost is pretty decidedly on the fringe of mainstream economics. But that's probably the point. Folks forget how small the actual feedback circle is for most journalists, academics, and pundits. In theory, all these groups write books, articles, and do media aimed at audiences of various sizes. But until very recently, that conversation was completely unidirectional: They spoke, but few had an opportunity to talk back. So their reinforcement came from colleagues, friends, folks in their social circle. And for most popular academics, particularly those at Harvard, that circle was large enough, grateful enough, sustaining enough. For more embattled ideologies, the opportunity to popularize in a new medium was probably comparatively more attractive.
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Which is a shame. Blogs are a remarkable tool for turning publicly-funded intellectuals into public intellectuals.

The last sentence is crucial. In light of how many of us are federally-funded, we need to engage the public more, outside of elite, academic circles. One good reason to blog, I think.

*: Of course, the most obvious reason is that people want the money...