Vernon Smith Leaves GMU; Bloggers Silent

GMU's economics department is, famously, full of bloggers. Its chairman Donald Boudreaux blogs at Cafe Hayek with colleague Russ Roberts; Robin Hanson founded Overcoming Bias; Bryan Caplan and Arnold Kling blog at EconLog; Peter Boettke blogs at The Austrian Economists; and, of course, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are bona fide stars of the blogosphere with their hugely popular Marginal Revolution. I'm sure there are more I don't know about, too. All of these bloggers are famously unrestrained.

GMU's economics department is, famously, also home to 2002 Nobel laureate Vernon Smith. (He's 80 years old, and a Nobelist, so you'll forgive him for not having a blog of his own.) Smith more or less invented the hugely fecund field of experimental economics, and is by far the most important economist at GMU.

So when GMU grad student Brian Hollar broke the news that Smith was leaving GMU and taking most of its experimental economics faculty with him to Chapman University in California, it's not surprising that the blogosphere immediately started buzzing. Or rather, it is surprising that the blogosphere didn't start buzzing: so far, none of the GMU economists has seen fit to mention this news at all. One might almost think that a don't-blog-this edict had gone out, either explicitly or implicitly. But certainly the silence is puzzling.

Update: Midas Oracle has the letter sent to GMU economics grad students.