Institutional quality is endogenously determined  

Maybe relatedly, my friend the economist Andrei Levchenko just got his working website up and running, and I was thinking about how impressed I am with economists and their use of the internet as a means of professional communication. If you look around for what's current in economics, you're bound to stumble across very transparent and informative websites, working papers, conversations in progress.

This doesn't seem to be true for instance in literature, where ideas are jealously guarded and the internet doesn't really exist as a scholarly medium. I remember a friend of mine (who's a lit prof) telling me a year or so ago that no self respecting academic would publish on the internet. She was clearly wrong about this, if you consider economists or political scientists or legal scholars to be academics, but I don't doubt that in literature her attitude toward the internet's popular communication is widespread. My inclination is to blame this on the literary academy's elitism and insecurity, but it probably also has a lot to do with literature's intimate relationship with the text, and the frightening lack of control (or even information) the internet embodies. It's a context where priestly elites, whether religious or academic, don't hold much sway.