I have no idea if health economists are under-represented on Twitter, but I do know that Twitter would be far more useful to the small number of us there if more health economists used it (actively!). I’ve seen a bunch on Facebook. So why not Twitter? What gives?
I count only three health economists on Twitter. Am I missing some?
- Austin Frakt <— me!
- Steve Parente <— not me!
- Paul Hughes-Cromwick <— also not me!
AF
by Stephanie on January 19th, 2012 at 17:30
4. Karen Davis <– also not you or me! some other commonwealth fund people are also on twitter but not sure how often any of them actually tweet.
by Austin Frakt on January 19th, 2012 at 18:50
OK, I have clarified it as “active on Twitter.” Karen Davis has 0 tweets and is only following three feeds: Twitter itself (why?), The Commonwealth Fund, and The US Backgammon Federation.
by Karen Grepin on January 20th, 2012 at 15:29
I guess you might count me as a health economist and I am active on Twitter, although my research focus is mostly international:
@KarenGrepin
by Don Taylor on January 20th, 2012 at 16:21
Hey Karen. Hope to see you when I come to NYC later this spring
by Austin Frakt on January 20th, 2012 at 20:58
Nice to meet you. Now following on Twitter. Why aren’t there more health economists there?
by April Harding on January 21st, 2012 at 16:32
Good question Austin.
Adam Wagstaff, a health economist in the World Bank’s research department tweets @adamw2011
I’m a health economist also at the World Bank. I tweet on health policy and health development assistance issues (and a bit of this and that) @april_harding
I’ve noticed this pattern: the most interesting exchanges on policy issues among health economists in Europe happen via listservs (Anglo-American Health Policy Network; and, European Health Policy Group). In the US, the action is in the blogs. Neither community has taken to the twittersphere.
It’s hard to even come up with a hypothesis about the low uptake of twitter among health economists. Are there other professions (or sub-professions) where we know the uptake rate is higher? Do we know if we are especially bad?
by James Buchanan on April 5th, 2012 at 08:27
There are plenty of health economists on Twitter, you need to look harder!
Have a look through the followers of our Twitter feed (and see also the people that we follow): https://twitter.com/HERC_Oxford