At the beginning of my summer break, my friend Shapiro and I founded a little corner of the internet called the Economic Adventures of Min and Shap, which I duly promoted at the time of its establishment. As two aspiring international political economists, or whatever it is we end up doing with our degrees, we thought -- or, at least, I think -- that blogging would be a good exercise to keep us on our economic toes, as such, and to carve out a space in which we could flex our burgeoning, though still nascent, analytical skills in the subject. We -- which is to say I -- have not done the best job of keeping up a regular posting schedule, though I'm hoping to improve on that.

I now have a very, very large incentive to do so.

Anyone who follows my shared items on Google Reader will notice very quickly that I'm a rather big fan of Matthew Yglesias, who qualifies as a rather prominent blogger in certain circles. I was going through my Reader feeds on Sunday when I stumbled across his daily round-up of links. Noticing that the two at the very top concerned the state of macroeconomics, my curiosity was naturally piqued and I opened them. Imagine my surprise when I found that the first of them was none other than The Curious Case of Macroeconomics, a post I wrote over at Min and Shap in an attempt to set down in mostly coherent form the problems that I, as a student of economics, had encountered in modern macro. How he found the post in the first place is a mystery to me, but he said it was "good," brought the blog an upward spike in traffic (and comments! there were comments!), and so there were certainly no complaints from this end. Indeed, I called Shapiro immediately upon this happening, and we were both terribly excited about it.

Later that day, I was checking my Reader again when I discovered that no one less than Brad DeLong, also a favourite blogger of mine, quoted extensively from that same post in his reflection on the state of macroeconomic education. And, oh my goodness, at the risk of sounding ridiculously starstruck with these fifteen minutes of fame (although, since this is the internet, fifteen seconds is likely a more appropriate duration), it's both incredibly surreal and altogether humbling to have your little pet project mentioned among the upper echelons of the blogosphere.

The ironic part, of course, is that I wrote that post out of a general sense of frustration with macro and with little intention of pursuing the subject further. Alas, the global economic crisis has forced me to realise that to ignore macro entirely would be very irresponsible of me. As I remarked to Shapiro, what would be even more ironic is if, as a result of all of this, I grew up to become some sort of self-loathing macroeconomist! Anyway, if you haven't yet, do hop on over to Min and Shap -- we really are going to try to blog more consistently!