Sep 1 2009, 12:36PM
Is There a Blogosphere in Europe?
I am in glamorous Kansas City at the moment, and am moving to England in a couple of weeks for two years of graduate school. This will mean less blogging in the near and medium terms. Hopefully it will mean smarter blogging in the long term. (I can hear Michael Goodfellow sharpening his knives in the comment section already: 'Perhaps now you will actually learn something about economics.' Perhaps.) But who knows.
I have enjoyed writing this blog immensely and will keep it up when I can. (The question in the headline is mostly serious: Are there good British blogs that I should be reading? Or books about British politics?) And I will miss the opportunity to argue with various people on a daily basis. But I very much like the idea of being a full-time graduate student, and I'm going to give that a whirl. I am pretty confident that the blogosphere will exist two years from now. I am less confident that I will have another opportunity to step off the treadmill for two years of government-subsidized procrastination. So I'm going to take the opportunity while it's here.
Thanks for reading.
Would a Belgian blog (yes, it exists!) do as well? After all, Belgium was created by the British in 1830, something which many of us still regret. Just saying. In case, it's here, but don't expect to learn much about the country, cos there isn't much to learn.
I was slightly amused at the thought of you taking economics after pontificating on it so much already, but of course, I was too polite to mock you in public.
Perhaps you could share your experience with visa requirements, as an antidote to your usual pro-government line?
Well, sure. I've had a terrible time getting a Visa, and I found some of the questions they ask -- there's one along the lines of 'have you ever done anything that might give someone the impression that you were perhaps not a person of good character?' -- a bit odd, especially since the British government is paying for my degrees and would (I hope) already consider me a person of passable moral fiber. So, lots of bureaucratic time-consuming nonsense. That said, I think it's perfectly fine to support a far more liberal immigration regime while still embracing a fairly wide role for the government.
I will miss the public mockery. But it hasn't stopped the under-qualified pontificating so far, and I have no reason to believe that will change in the future! We'll see.
How about lying about the mis-stated statistics in your blog on the 0.21% socialism in the US?
Study hard, dude. I'll miss disagreeing with you. Don't let the liberal English professors take you even further left. Remember to read Mankiw and Keith Hennessey.
Hope your studies go well, Conor. I've enjoyed your blogging work so far.
Perhaps this would be a good question to put to Andrew, but I imagine the stricter libel laws in Great Britain might lead to a lot less blogging or at least a very different kind of blogging if people are more likely to face litigation over what they may write that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in the U.S.
I recommend you take at least a course in statistics. You may need to take prerequisites down to basic algebra, based your mis-statements of elementary mathematical principles.