Top 100 Economics Blogs

Check out the latest "Top 100 Economics Blogs" here. The blurb for No Hesitations (under "Sub-field Economic Blogs") is pretty funny, issuing a stern warning: 

His blog is primarily focused on statistics and econometrics, and is highly technical. Therefore, it is recommended for those with advanced knowledge of economics and mathematics.

In reality, and as I'm sure you'll agree if you're reading this, it's actually simple and intuitive! I guess it's all relative. Anyway the blurb does get this right: "It is especially recommended for those wanting to learn more about dynamic predictive modeling in economics and finance."

Quite apart from pros and cons of its No Hesitations blurb (surely of much more interest to me than to you...), the list provides an informative and timely snapshot of the vibrant economics blogosphere.

One Millionth Birthday...

 ...in event time.  It's true, yesterday No Hesitations passed 1,000,000 page views.  Totally humbling.  I am grateful for your interest and support.

No Hesitations at 500K

Some company just emailed to inform me that No Hesitations had made its list of the Top 100 Economics Blogs.  I was pretty happy until I decided that there were probably only 70 or 80 economics blogs.

But seriously, thanks a lot for your wonderful support.  No Hesitations has about 500,000 pageviews since launching in summer 2013, and the trend (below) looks good.  The time has flown by, and I look forward to continuing.

Holiday Haze

Your dedicated blogger is about to vanish in the holiday haze, returning in the new year. Meanwhile, all best wishes for the holidays.








[Photo credit:  Public domain, by Marcus Quigmire, from Florida, USA (Happy Holidays  Uploaded by Princess Mérida) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

OK, I'll Continue With Google Blogger

First, apologies for the posts about my Google Blogger situation. I fear that they border on spam, but at the same time I need to communicate the situation.

Anyway, wow, what a flow of communications regarding the last post, from more routes and with more concerns than I knew existed (e.g., I had no idea that so many people were using RSS feeds).  OK, I'll leave things on Google Blogger, just as always, as it's true that many of the Google problems seem now to have been resolved. (Let me know if you're still getting warnings or whatever.) One remaining thing that's really annoying is that Twitter won't let me tweet anything containing the URL "fxdiebold.blogspot.com". (Evidently Twitter shares blacklists with Google but is negligent in refreshing the list.) That's why the tweets, now contain "fxdiebold dot blogspot dot com" instead, which makes it harder for you, since you have to edit the "dots" and can't just tap directly on a live hyperlink. Thanks for putting up with such nonsense; hopefully that too will soon be fixed.

And finally, many thanks for your support. It's most gratifying to know that I'm serving you well. I view No Hesitations as one of the most important things that I do. Thanks again.

Cutting Ties With Google Blogger

The nonsense reported in my May 23 post actually goes well beyond what I reported, to the point where I've lost patience.  (I'm sure I'll eventually blog further on it.)  So henceforth I plan to disintermediate Google, instead hosting the No Hesitations blog on my University of Pennsylvania site, at http://www.ssc.upenn.edu/~fdiebold/NH.html. A crude skeleton site is there now. I will continue to tweet announcements of new posts (again they'll be at the new URL), which should be automatically forwarded to Facebook. As for Google+ followers, I'm not yet sure what I'll do, but don't worry, I'll figure out a way to keep you alerted.  As for people who get automatic email alerts, first-best is to switch to following on twitter, second best is to email me and I'll put you on a new blog notification emailing list if I create one. (But please, if at all possible go the first-best route.) I'm sure that it will be a bit of a rough ride for a couple months, but we'll get there. Thanks very, very, much for your support. Should be interesting.

No Hesitations is Not a Phishing Site!

Google's "automatic system" a few days ago "determined" that No Hesitations (fxdiebold.blogspot.com) was a phishing site. (Phishing sites attempt to scam users into revealing credit card numbers, etc. No Hesitations is not a phishing site! Indeed it's obviously impossible, as readers are never asked for any information of any kind.) So Google shut it down, with only a terse and uninformative machine-generated "no-reply" email to me. Literally, No Hesitations just vanished! I then found a way to request a human review, which Google did. They immediately agreed that they were mistaken, and they restored the site. HOWEVER, they neglected to remove No Hesitations from Google's "Safe Browsing" blacklist, so that a warning may appear when you attempt to access the site, depending on your browser and its settings. Obviously I have notified Google of this remaining problem, which they'll hopefully fix soon (although it's not obvious, as all the automated Google stuff is very much a black box). Meanwhile, if you get the bogus warning, just click on "details" and then "visit this infected site," and you'll be in. (Regarding "this infected site," thanks a lot, Google. Totally insulting, and surely harmful to the site's traffic. Isn't your motto "Don't be evil"?) 

Holiday Haze

Your dedicated blogger is about to vanish in the holiday haze, presumably returning early in the new year. I hope to see you at the Boston ASSA Penn party. (I promise to show up this time. Seriously.) Meanwhile, all best wishes for the holidays.





[Photo credit:  Public domain, by Marcus Quigmire, from Florida, USA (Happy Holidays  Uploaded by Princess Mérida) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

You Can Now Browse by Topic

You can now browse No Hesitations by topic.  Check it out -- just look in the right column, scrolling down a bit. I hope it's useful.

Don't Hesitate to Post Comments

A brief plea: PLEASE don't hesitate to post comments. Instead what usually happens is that people email me directly, and I can't respond, and I feel bad that I can't respond, and the sender feels bad that I didn't respond, and most importantly, people who would benefit from reading the comment (and perhaps reading comments on the comment, or themselves commenting on the comment) never get to see it. A bad equilibrium all around.

My next post will collect a few of the email comments that I got on the last post, Thoughts on Factor-Augmented VAR's. But again, that's a terribly inefficient way to proceed. Please just post your comments directly.

Maybe after that I'll post a few provocative rants to see what you have to say.

Related, some of you get my posts via Twitter or Facebook and occasionally comment, which is great, but society would benefit if you would post comments directly on the blog, in addition to Facebook or whatever, as most people access the blog directly and hence will never see your Facebook comments.

Thanks for your consideration. And of course many, many thanks for reading.

New posts coming soon!

Holiday Haze

Your dedicated blogger is about to vanish in the holiday haze, presumably stumbling back sometime early in the new year.

Random thought: Obviously I guessed that I'd enjoy writing this blog, or I wouldn't have started, but I had no idea how truly satisfying it would be, or, for that matter, that anyone would actually read it! Many thanks my friends. I look forward to returning soon. Meanwhile, all best wishes for the holidays.


[Photo credit:  Public domain, by Marcus Quigmire, from Florida, USA (Happy Holidays  Uploaded by Princess Mérida) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

LaTeX/MathJax Rendering in Blog Posts

It seems that LaTeX/MathJax is working fine with my blog, including with mobile devices, which is great (see, for example, my recent post On the Wastefulness of (Pseudo-) Out-of-Sample Predictive Model Comparisons). However, a problem exists for those with email delivery, who just get raw LaTeX dumped into the email. If that happens to you, simply click on the blog post title in the email. Then you'll be taken to the actual blog, and it should render well.

Please let me know of any other problems!

Pure Brilliance From FRB St. Louis: EconomicAcademics.org

This just in from Christian Zimmermann and the RePEc Team at FRB St. Louis:

"Congratulations, you made the list! .. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis is launching a blog aggregator, EconomicAcademics.org, to highlight and promote the discussion of economics research. Your blog is part of this effort. This email explains why and how you can help promote the discussion of economic research in the blogosphere ... EconAcademics.org lives at http://econacademics.org/ and aggregates blog posts that discuss economic research. The aggregator looks through blog posts for a link to some research indexed on a RePEc service, currently EconPapers, IDEAS and NEP. IDEAS then also links back from the abstract page to the blog posts ... This blog aggregator is provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which also offers with FRED database and graphing tool as a useful resources for bloggers. Feel free to use the graphs on your blog, best done by embedding them so that readers can click on them to get more details about the data. FRED lives at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/." 

This is totally brilliant. First, it's a brilliant public service. I am grateful. Everyone should be grateful. But second, and this is really what I want to emphasize, ya gotta love the brilliant business/marketing move. Instantly, every blogger now has a strong incentive to report on (and link to) RePEc papers whenever possible -- in case you missed it above, blog posts get noticed by the aggregator only if/when they link to a RePEc paper -- and hence authors have a correspondingly strong incentive to put their papers on RePEc. And it's all tangled up with the wonderful FRED. The idea may not make billions for FRBSL/RePEc/FRED, but in its own way it's as brilliant as Google's pagerank (and cynics will say as obvious -- just sour grapes).

Oh wait. I forgot to mention a RePEc paper above, so this post won't get picked up by EconAcademics. Hmmm... In the future I'll have to change that...

Anyway, SSRN et al. must be reeling! Of course it will be interesting to see how they and others respond. FRBSL/RePEc/FRED have scored a significant first-mover blow, but surely the fight isn't over. And as usual with healthy competition, everyone will benefit.

Blogging Environments

Speaking of ideal environments, how could I have forgotten blogging environments in my last post?

Not that I really know much. And not that you care. Anyway, a typical recent Diebold family exchange says it all:

Daughter 1: Dad, why are you doing a stupid blog?

Me: I'm not sure. And it's not stupid. And thanks for your support.

Daughter 1: And why are you doing your stupid blog using stupid Google Blogger?

Me: I'm not sure. And thanks for your support.

Daughter 1: No cool bloggers use Blogger. Only old people who don't know any better. You should use WordPress.

Me: What are you talking about? What's WordPress? All my blogging friends use Blogger.

Daughter 1: They're all old people who don't know any better.

Daughter 2: Don't listen to her, Dad -- Blogger is perfectly fine and totally cool.

Wife: What's a blog?

In my experience regarding e-matters, the youngest is generally right. So Daughter 2 (age 14) wins -- for now I'm staying with Blogger. I'm delighted to learn that Blogger is cool, and that by implication I'm cool.

No Hesitations Birthday

Wow, I can't believe that No Hesitations now has 1000 page views, and it's only a few days old, and with only one real post. Of course I understand that by the standards of the blogosphere 1000 is basically 0, but I am nevertheless humbled. And I swear that no more than 985 of the page views are mine. Only a billion more until I match Cochrane! Thanks my friends.

Questions

Two questions loom large in my mind: (1) Am I really writing a blog?, and (2) If so, how did I get here? The answers are (1) Yes, and (2) I'm not exactly sure, but I'm the same as I ever was.

Why No Hesitations? At first I liked No Reservations, but then I realized that a certain ex-chef turned television star might take issue (read: sue me), so I settled on No Hesitations, which is actually better for several reasons. First, it conveys the same flavor of honest, no-holds-barred, observation. Second, it discards the double entendre of "no reservations," which is sensible since I don't plan to write about restaurant meals (although you never know). Third, again, I won't get sued. So it's good all around.

As it says in the "About The Blog" blurb, this blog will contain news and views, comment and criticism, rants and raves. Perhaps the best way to sketch a bit of what I plan to do is to start by sketching a bit of what I won't do. First, I promise not to torture you with boring policy drivel. Put differently, if I ever post an installment with a title of, say, ``On Regulatory Framework Considerations for Theoretical and Empirical Macro-Prudential Analysis of Systemic Risk with Implications for Basel XIV," please shoot me. In addition, I won't provide too much commentary on current events, as doing so would require me to know about current events.  Seriously, though, friends like Jim Hamilton and Menzie Chin at  Econbrowser, or John Cochrane at The Grumpy Economist would run circles around me -- their continuous insights and energy never cease to amaze me.

OK, what then will I do, if I don't torture you with current events and policy drivel? Basically I'll torture you with Diebold drivel. In particular, if you're interested in financial markets and associated macroeconomic fundamentals, in their relation to data, statistics and predictive modeling, you'll like the blog. Did I mention data, statistics and predictive modeling?

Let me expand on my assertion of "honest, no-holds-barred, observations." You'll find No Hesitations quirky and different, turning stones often unnoticed, let alone turned. For example, in addition to Diebold drivel, you'll find ruminations on things ranging from academic life to Led Zeppelin. And you'll find it mildly irreverent, if you haven't already. By the way, did I mention data, statistics and predictive modeling?

So much for wanton aggrandizing. But while I'm at it, let me take it to the limit, concluding as I began, with a question: Might No Hesitations emerge as the most interesting blog in the world? Stay reading my friends.  

About the Drawing

The 1863 drawing is Cavalry Soldier with Sword on Horseback, by Winslow Homer (1836-1910), done in black chalk on tan paper. It's in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York. It's in the public domain, and the image (also in the public domain) is available at Wikimedia Commons.