Bruce Bartlett engages in some bloggy triumphalism over the sprawling economist coffee klatch his Supply Side article triggered over at Mark Thoma's place. I'm with him, though. One nice thing about the blogs is that they allow experts to speak about premises and background that more traditional outlets rarely let them engage. Magazine articles and newspaper op-eds always demand that you to advance the ball beyond what the editors know that morning, or published five years ago. That's great, but for many of us readers, it would be better to get a contextual explanation of things the expert learned 15 years ago. So while it's unlikely Bruce Bartlett could have sold anyone on a debate between him and Paul Krugman on what the Keynesians believed in the mid-70s, I actually found it very interesting.
Mark, by the way, runs a wonderful blog, and has really pushed to open it up to economists ranging from Bartlett to Krugman to Galbraith. Folks should be reading him, and by extension, them.
