I’ve long been fascinated by the economic approach to human behavior, as described in books like David Friedman’s Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, the popular Freakonomics and the collective work of Nobel prize-winning economist Gary S. Becker.

Prompted by a conversation on MyLinkedInPowerForum about the relative value of LinkedIn vs. MLPF — not to the owners, but to individual participants — I was Googling Becker and discovered The Becker-Posner Blog, a collaboration between Becker and legal/economics expert Richard Posner.

Besides the simply brilliant thinking and writing of these two individuals, the blog is intriguing because it’s also frequently a conversation between the two authors on the same topic, and they’re not afraid to take on some pretty controversial topics, or to take an unpopular stance on them. For example:

• Becker on The Erosion of Individual Responsibility and Posner’s comment
• Posner’s Post-Mortem Critique of William Buckley and Becker’s comment

These guys are also doing an amazing job of sparking conversation. 514 posts have generated 11,840 comments — that’s a 23:1 ratio! Not many blogs have that.

I encourage you to check it out, as well as the Freakonomics blog and David Friedman’s blog.