2010 Roundup

It's been a fun year at Offsetting. The posts on the youth minimum wage received some minor New Zealand press coverage as well as mention in Parliament. The posts lamenting the execrable state of New Zealand journalism, at least in handling social science and medical reporting on correlation and causality, have led to my being scheduled to give a short seminar on such matters for the Christchurch Press end-February. Seamus posted once or twice; perhaps the muse will strike him again in 2011.

What were the top posts of 2010? Here's a list culled from Google Analytics's list of most read pages, Feedburner's list of most viewed pages, Google Reader's list of most "liked" pages and a couple of personal favorites.

• Insuring the Uninsurable
• Assurance contracts and dominant assurance contracts
• One day a week restaurant
• Gollum in the DSM
• Youth unemployment rates and the youth minimum wage
• Stopping points on the Road to Serfdom
• The alcohol J-curve: science versus politics
• Yer either fer us or agin us
• Conscientious non-voting
• Health costs of tobacco
• Folk activism
• I'll see your utopia and raise you a dystopia
• In defense of price gouging
• Court philosophers
• That ol' Somali Spirit

According to LemmusLemmus at the Church of Rationality, two of my posts merited special attention:

• In defense of price gouging
• Wage discrimination: the evidence

LemmusLemmus saves his top kudos for Nick Rowe's post on economic calculation in the academic commonwealth - rightly so. Beats anything I've posted this year.

Well, except maybe for my post on Transfusions and Operating Room Ethics. Easy pick for me this year as my top post.

Google Analytics tells me Offsetting Behaviour received 136,460 pageviews (116,846 unique) for the year. Feedburner counts 163,401 additional views starting at 14 June (when I started Feedburner) and an average of 416 subscribers for the period (has hovered around 480 more recently). Ken Perrott's rankings had Offsetting in the top-20 most-read New Zealand blogs fairly often in 2010, but not always.

Alexa says readers here are disproportionately grad school educated, high-earning men over the age of 45 reading from home. That might mean I should add ads! I can't imagine the traffic here warrants it though.

Google Analytics lets me rank traffic sources by ISP. All this is distorted by that folks mostly browse from home, but so long as the two correlate, they're interesting.

• Among NZ government departments, I'm most popular with The Treasury, followed by the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Economic Development, The Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Social Development and Department of Parliamentary Services.
• A few banks and finance companies read: Gareth Morgan Investments and Westpac in particular, but also Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (albeit far less often).
• Most NZ universities have munged trackback data saying only "imported inetnum object for..." followed by some code. But of named ones, Offsetting's most popular (ranked by visits) at Victoria University at Wellington, followed by Canterbury, UC Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Harvard, George Mason, Massey, Columbia, U Melbourne, Georgetown, Princeton and Dickinson College. I think Canterbury also shows up as one of those coded trackbacks above Vic.

I'll add some of the top posts above to the favorites at right in due course. But it's going to have to be far less than a 2% sample as we're now past 1000 posts. Thanks for reading!