One Year of ValleyEcon Blog

It was one year ago today that I made my first Blog post. Since then, I have made 180 posts, one roughly every 2 days.

When I started, there were about 5 hits a day. Now, the blog gets about 30 visits on a typical weekday and is growing slowly. There are a small number of frequent visitors who are very interested in water posts, visitors from state and federal government who seem equally interested in water and economic outlook posts, and google search hits that span all topics but are very interested in housing/foreclosure posts.

The highest number of visitors was the evening a few months ago when Sean Hannity broadcast live from the Central Valley, which apparantly led to a huge spike in people around the world Googling Delta Smelt, some of which landed on this blog.

Although this is a general blog about regional economic issues, the most popular posts (in terms of number of hits) are about Delta water issues and the peripheral canal, so the blog has evolved where about 50% of posts are about water.

So, what was the topic of the inaugaural post on November 12, 2008? The PPIC study on the Delta, and my critique of it. I wish that events over the past year would have made this old post irrelevant, but that isn't the case.

We are all still waiting for the PPIC authors to show their pro-peripheral canal conclusion is robust to more realistic data assumptions and they have had plenty of time to rerun the models now. [Note: Even their original analysis didn't show a peripheral canal was the best strategy, just that it was the cheapest under a set of unrealistic assumptions. The key unrealistic assumptions are that desalination and water recycling technology will go backwards rather than improve over they next 40 years, and that CA population will grow much faster than projected. These aren't the only problems, the list of errors keeps growing.]