How Much Can the Poor Nation Stand?

Today’s NY Times has an article about legal blogs (“blawgs”).  The article reports on the following:

A survey conducted by Blogads.com,which administers online advertising on blog sites, and completedvoluntarily by 30,000 blog visitors last spring, found that 5.1 percentof the people reading the blogs were lawyers or judges, putting thatgroup fourth behind computer professionals, students and retirees. Thesurvey also found that of the 6,232 people who said they also kepttheir own blogs, 6.1 percent said they were in the legal profession,putting lawyers fourth again, behind the 17.5 percent who said theywere in the field of education, 15.1 percent in computer software and6.4 percent in media, said Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads. Heconceded that the survey was hardly scientific, but argued that atleast it undermined the popular image of the blogosphere as dominatedby antsy teenagers and programmers in their pajamas, tapping away atkeyboards all night.

Although the survey was concededly “hardly scientific,” we can at least assume that there are a lot of lawyers typing away and reading in the blogosphere.  Being around lawyers and aspiring lawyers all of the time, the statistic in the article that was more striking (at least to me) was that lawyers make up “considerably less” than 1% of the population (I assume the US population, but the article doesn’t specify). 

ContractsProf doesn’t “get props” in the article, but some notable Prof Blogs do: Eugene Volokh at  www.volokh.comwww.lessig.orgbalkin.blogspot.comwww.instapundit.com.

All of the blawging brings to mind Tom Paxton’s song One Million Lawyers (off of the Album “One Million Lawyers and Other Disasters“):

In spring there’s tornadoes and rampaging floods,
In summer it’s heat stroke and draught.
There’s Ivy League football to ruin the fall,
It’s a terrible scourge, without doubt.
There are blizzards to batter the shivering plain.
There are dust storms that strike, but far worse
Is the threat of disaster to shrivel the brain,
It’s the threat of implacable curse.

In ten years we’re gonna have one million [blawgers],
One million [blawgers], one million [blawgers].
In ten years we’re gonna have one million [blawgers].
How much can a poor nation stand?

[Meredith R. Miller]