The Becker-Posner Blog and the Anti-Becker-Posner Blog

The two newest additions to The Economics Blog Resource Page are a study in contrasts:

The Becker-Posner Blog
is a class act. The authors are Gary Becker, University Professor in
the Department of Economics and Sociology and Professor in the Graduate
School of Business in the University of Chicago, and Judge Richard
Posner, Senior Lecturer in Law at The University of Chicago Law School.
Professor Becker, born in 1930, has an 8 page CV (PDF) which covers an illustrious academic career. Judge Posner has an equally rich resume (Word doc),
culminating in his role as Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals
for the Seventh Circuit. The blog consists of elegantly-written and
carefully argued short essays by the two authors, with one often
responding to the other. Subjects tend to be highly topical, such as
terrorism, spam, estate taxes, China's economy, Medicare and Social
Security. The blog has been operating since December 2004 with roughly
one interchange plus comments per week.

The Anti-Becker-Posner Blog
is a response to The Becker-Posner Blog and a study in contrasts, down
to the style and color scheme. The anonymous administrator wants it to
be "a community blog... Anyone who catches any mistake or omission in
any post by Becker or Posner is invited to comment..." So far there is
only one author - the administrator, whose own comments are short and
pithy responses to the Becker-Posner posts. Anonymity is justified on
the following grounds: "You should judge my arguments by their content,
not by my identity... I'm not claiming any special knowledge, and I see
no need for you to have them [sic] to judge the claims and conclusions
on this blog. My biases should be fairly clear from the title and
content." That's a suspect argument since anonymity, particularly in
blogs and message boards, often encourages a lack of courtesy that
would never be expressed if the author was face to face with the people
he was criticising. The tag line for the blog, for example, is "A Blog
devoted to correcting the mistakes, omissions, and downright nonsense
on the Becker-Posner-Blog." Charming. A better principle is: if you're
not comfortable being associated with what you write, you probably
shouldn't be writing it. Launched in May 2005 with timing of posts
determined by the Becker-Posner Blog. Prof Becker and Judge Posner, by
the way, had the class to link to The Anti-Becker-Posner Blog
themselves.

Both blogs have also been added to the public Bloglines page of
feeds from the Resource Pages covering the stock market, economy, venture capital and personal finance at http://www.bloglines.com/public/SeekingAlpha, allowing you to track the
blogs in one place or import all the feeds in one shot into your own RSS reader/aggregator. Details here.