Economics at the NY Times

At the end of his column today, David Leonhardt reports:

If you read Sunday’s business section, you probably noticed that Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist, blogger and Republican policy adviser, wrote the Economic View column. His debut as a regular contributor is the start of some changes in our economics coverage.

The View column will now be written by a rotating panel of outside economists. Besides Mr. Mankiw, it will include Alan Blinder, Judith Chevalier, Robert Shiller and Lester Thurow, as well as three of the economists who have been writing the Economic Scene column on Thursdays: Austan Goolsbee, Tyler Cowen and Robert Frank. (The fourth member of the Scene rotation, Hal R. Varian, is leaving to concentrate on his new role as Google’s chief economist.)

They are a stellar group, and they will use the column to examine everything from big policy questions to the economics of everyday life. By moving the economists to Sunday, when our section isn’t filled with news, we think we can give their writing more attention.

Here is my proposed topic of discussion for the comments section: Is this a "fair and balanced" group? In particular, one might ask two more specific questions. First, if you count the number of these eight economists who lean left and the number who lean right, perhaps leaving out a few without any particular political viewpoint, what ratio do you get? Second, is this group representative of the range of views in the American Economic Association? Bonus question: What economist would you to have seen added to this list?