Tyler’s secret blog

No one ratted out Tyler.

Related to this, here’s an observation that made me smile:

this is the nub of the matter. No-one has told Chris Masse the blog’s address yet. Tyler’s loyal readers really are loyal. “I am heartened by the honesty and cooperativeness of the blog-reading community,” Tyler says. If you ask homo economicus, he will tell you that as a rule loyalty [...] is for suckers. In other circumstances, the kind of people likely to buy books like Discover Your Inner Economist would tell you that, too. They might throw in a bit of eye-rolling on strategy, defection, and self-seeking with guile for your benefit as well. But Tyler Cowen has mobilized a bunch of these people into a secret society; gotten them to police the society via such classically sociological rewards and punishments as social closure, exclusivity and honorific censure; and done so without even having a real secret to give them to keep in the first place. This is why I assign some of Tyler’s stuff in my economic sociology courses. You’ve got to respect the guy.