Answering YOUR Questions

Q&A time

Last week, I thought it would be fun to have a mailbag column. If you asked a question, I answered it – but there are no guarantees it’s above the paywall. Now, questions and answers.

Harigovind S: Do you agree that economists are uniquely bad at presenting their work to public audiences? Context to my question is that this does not seem to be a problem facing psychologists for example whereas pop economics books are filled with anthropological accounts and no discussion of econometric traps and resolutions. Is this a result of the poor training economists receive in articulation or are conceptual ideas in economics fundamentally more difficult to communicate? I am interested in your thoughts seeing as you communicate the methodology of the field so effectively and persuasively.

I think this is partly our fault, and also partly not our fault.

Where it’s not our fault is this: the public does not particularly care about learning true things at all. The claims which are super successful in popular culture are those which are counter-intuitive but obvious upon consideration. They’re things which you can tell to your co-worker and feel a little bit superior as a knowing one. They don’t have to be deep, they don’t have to generalize. They can be cute. They can even be false.

I think everybody wants to see magic, right? The fun facts are the flourishes, the rabbit being pulled out of the hat. People are less interested in how the hat was manufactured, or how to manufacture rabbit hats yourself, but that’s what you need to know for the magic to be anything more than a bit of dazzle.

I have high standards for myself in how I present findings. I am just not all that interested in results, fundamentally. Results depend on parameter values, and parameters change. What doesn’t change are the methods which let you answer many questions. So to me, simply presenting a result is not presenting science at all. I need to prove the result by arguing for it above all other possibilities, and so it’s important for me to go through the paper, discuss whether and how it can make the claims it makes even in theory, then whether the data supports the results, and then where that stands in a broader world.

Where it is our fault is that a lot of people in the profession have no interest in really communicating science to the public. (For that is what economics is! Scientific inquiry into how the world works, same as any other!). Many people are content with the quiet life of publication. Now, I am happy to grant comparative advantage. Getting a platform is hard. Some people are not as good at it as others, although I sincerely doubt that I really have any great advantage in talent than enthusiasm. (That, and having lots of time to read everything). But a lot of people in the profession frown upon it, although naturally you will have only heard this in person; see this thread for color.

The Literary Quant: What was your experience as a child and what was it like to mature into an adult? How did being on the spectrum factor into this? How would you say your childhood affected or still affects your worldview?