The Interactive Classroom: Mark Thoma

Thoma's 'Economist's View' blog enriches the curriculum--and attracts the best minds in the business

When Mark Thoma first launched his economics blog in the spring of 2005, he envisioned having a few stimulating exchanges with perhaps ten of his peers. To his dismay, in a matter of weeks he was getting emails from leading economists all over the world, being quoted in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and engaging in public discussions with such heavyweights as Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson, Harvard's Greg Mankiw, UC Berkeley's Brad DeLong, and Princeton's Paul Krugman.

Today Thoma's blog, Economist's View, attracts more than 10,000 daily visitors worldwide and is rated one of the top five economics blogs by blog tracker Technorati. Other rating agencies place Economist's View consistently in the top ten blogs in its class internationally. And leading economists who have engaged Thoma in online debates--a process that often attracts the comments of many others in their field--say it's "like being in a seminar room with some of the smartest people on the planet." (See "Blog!" by Bruce Bartlett, National Review Online, April 17, 2007.)

Despite his sudden celebrity, Thoma remains modest, almost self-effacing­--a down-to-earth professor dedicated to creating a stimulating intellectual forum and eager to share the wealth of ideas with his students.

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