The past week was the first full-week that I looked at feedback from Google Analytics where I learned something about the geographic distribution of visitors to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror (ERVM). There was a marked surge in page visits due to the coincidence of the Stanley Fischer posting getting New York Times mention in David Leonhardt’s The Upshot under the heading “Best of the Web…Stuff We Liked” and a Joseph Schumpeter posting getting almost two full days of front-page status at the subreddit: Reddit/r/economics.
By the way, apparently the Reddit algorithm for ranking links is based on a 1927 paper by Edwin B. Wilson! For a 1930 lecture by Wilson at the U.S. Department of Agriculture graduate school, see this posting.
What I glean from the map above is that you visitors are the world which is pretty gratifying for a blog going into only its sixth month of existence. What is striking from the actual numbers behind the map is that the number of page visits is dominated by the U.S. with Canada/UK/Germany constituting the next group with the rest of the 70-some countries registering generally fewer than ten visits and only about two dozen countries in double digits.
Like Adam Smith wrote “The Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market”, so with the global connectivity of today it makes sense to Specialize in one’s own blog content. I certainly take comfort in seeing that those of us interested in the story of the development of economics in the twentieth century, while few in a relative sense, are hardly alone. Hope you do too.