This week marks the ten-year anniversary of this Sex, Drugs and Economics blog. Here's my first post (from 8 October 2013), briefly explaining my rationale for blogging, including:
...this blog is a way for me to create a discussion space for my students, and help them to recognise the value in the economic approach to looking at real-world situations.
I think it has been relatively successful in that. My blog is often mentioned in student comments in the end-of-trimester teaching evaluations, as one of the most important aspects of my teaching. Around half of the posts in recent years have been tailored towards illustrating first-year economics concepts in action in the real world (that's why there are so many posts that have graphs). Most of the rest of the posts discuss recent economics research, making the blog is complementary to the Waikato Economics Discussion (EDG) group (on Facebook here), which meets every couple of weeks during teaching to discuss recent economics research.
While I had hoped to create a discussion space for students, it has turned out that much of the discussion doesn't happen on the blog itself. The comments section is pretty quiet. However, I do know that the blog is relatively widely read among my current and former students and others, and discussed inside and outside of class.
Finally, here's a few statistics on the blog's first ten years. The blog is closing in on half a million page views (498,709 as of right now), and tends to get between 4000 and 6000 page views per month on average (more during teaching time, especially around assessments, for obvious reasons). The blog currently has 27 followers on Follow.it (you can subscribe to get email updates using the box on the right). There would probably be more followers, but we had to reset when Feedburner was killed off in July last year. Also, others may follow the blog through Feedly or other aggregators, or via my posts to the EDG Facebook group.
This is my 1698th post on the blog. I usually post around 20 times a month. My most read post of all time is this one from 2014 on the economics of drug development and pricing, with over 3000 page views. Next are this one on the cobweb model of supply and demand, this one on the deadweight loss of rent control, this one on Pigovian taxes and tradeable pollution permits, and this one on advertising and consumer choice. They all have between 1700 and 2200 page views, no doubt because of their relevance for my first-year classes.
My favourite topics to post on are demand and supply, rational behaviour, and market power (because of their relevance to teaching), as well as teaching and learning, and alcohol. The latter reflects one of my key research interests. I have also posted 129 book review posts (some of which have covered more than one book). I know that the book reviews are read by at least some of my most keen students, and have led to reading recommendations in both directions.
I also have to acknowledge my students for sharing interesting material with me, that has directly led to several of my posts. And a special mention to my wife, the incomparable Gemma Piercy-Cameron, who reads some of my more difficult posts in order to ensure that they are as understandable as possible, as well as holding me back from saying things that are truly stupid. Without that help, I'm sure the blog would not be nearly as readable as it is.
Overall, the blog is still going strong. One of my favourite blogs and a source of inspiration for many of my posts, Marginal Revolution, recently celebrated twenty years of blogging (see here and here). My blog is almost exactly half as old as theirs. If I'm still feeling the energy to do this in another ten years, that will be a great achievement. We will see how I go!
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