GMU’s economics department is, famously, full of bloggers. Its chairman Donald
Boudreaux blogs at Cafe Hayek
with colleague Russ Roberts; Robin Hanson
founded Overcoming Bias; Bryan
Caplan and Arnold Kling blog at EconLog;
Peter Boettke blogs at The
Austrian Economists; and, of course, Tyler Cowen and Alex
Tabarrok are bona fide stars of the blogosphere with their
hugely popular Marginal Revolution.
I’m sure there are more I don’t know about, too. All of these bloggers are famously
unrestrained.
GMU’s economics department is, famously, also home to 2002 Nobel laureate Vernon
Smith. (He’s 80 years old, and a Nobelist, so you’ll forgive him for
not having a blog of his own.) Smith more or less invented the hugely fecund
field of experimental economics, and is by far the most important economist
at GMU.
So when GMU grad student Brian Hollar broke
the news that Smith was leaving GMU and taking most of its experimental
economics faculty with him to Chapman University in California, it’s not surprising
that the blogosphere immediately started buzzing. Or rather, it is
surprising that the blogosphere didn’t start buzzing: so far, none
of the GMU economists has seen fit to mention this news at all. One might almost
think that a don’t-blog-this edict had gone out, either explicitly or implicitly.
But certainly the silence is puzzling.
Update: Midas Oracle has the letter
sent to GMU economics grad students.