I suspect that this may be pertinent to followers of the Andrew Keen trolling that the Net makes everything worse…

Certainly it ups the quality of debate.

2. Top economists like Greenstone virtually never write papers like this. The simple reason is that this sort of work is not rewarded in our profession. Academic economists are judged by the papers they publish in peer-reviewed journals. The lag time between submission to these journals and publication is often two or more years. By that time, no one will be interested in the surge, so editors won’t want to publish the paper. Consequently, good economists don’t think it is worth their while to do topical work like this.

3. Instead, this sort of analysis tends to be done by bad economists, or economists on the payroll of special interests. These reports might appear informative, but instead are often pure propaganda. To outsiders, it is difficult to determine what is careful analysis like Greenstone has produced versus the usual junk.

4. The internet can potentially solve both problems (2) and (3) above, leading to an increased supply of good, timely analysis. If people like Greenstone can immediately get their findings into the public debate through the internet, it gives a real purpose (not just an academic one) to doing the work. In addition, there are now online peer-reviewed academic journals that have greatly sped the time from submission to publication, potentially increasing the academic payoff to someone like Greenstone. With many respected economists now blogging, there is also a vehicle for these folks to weigh in on the quality of policy-related economic writings — like I am doing in this blog post.