economics communication in the public
In my mind, there is a big divide from the economics that I interact with on a daily basis and what the average american considers to be economics. As a high school student, I took the same view as the general public. I listened NPR in the mornings on the way to school where some “Senior Economist” from X company would qualitatively talk about the macroeconomics trends in some sector of the economy. During undergrad, however, a lot of my classes between math and cs were very quantitiatvely heavy and seemed to require deeper analysis than was found on the “Marketplace Morning Report”. It felt like there was a serious disconnect between the economics displayed in public and what I was experiencing myself in college. I had soon formed this idea that when people talk about macroeconomics in the news and in politics, it was using the tools of basic data analysis and the same coarse supply and demand graphs we studied in AP Macro and Micro; there was no sophisticated thought process underlying the intuition. This personal disastifaction with how imprecise I felt economics was handled even extented to the Federal Reserve and how Powell talked about why whatever rate decisions was being made. It felt like the important decisions were being made based on simple statements about how a price drop in thing A automatically implies that effect B occurs and I would cringe when I heard some econ commentary done by a non-economist that would not use the non-technical jargon that I had gotten used to. There did not seem to be many statements about the non-linear interactions economists think exist between all the different components of the economy or all the complex ways agents in our modeling process simultaneously solve their own optimization problems. I’ve since changed my view about how economics is communicated to an extent (which I will talk about shortly), but I still feel as if this divide is the quintessential issue in the relationship between public distrust and academia. I’ve been digging through the weeds that is the medical research on diet and personal health over the past year so I am well aware of the same divide in other academic fields, but I know both tranches of econ a lot more than other fields so I can speak to that better.
Economics is obviously a hot button topic in politics because most everyone has to deal with money in some context and relies on it for their livelihood. People care about economic policy a lot but political ideologies about what is the right economic policy is very split. Among economists, however, my personal experience has been that people are not as much split along political lines as they are academic ideology wise when it comes to the actual economics that they are doing. To me, the academic ideology doesn’t seem to have as many direct links to the political divide as people consider it to have either. I feel like the perception of economists is that they look at graphs all day long and try to come up with some qualitative justifcation to explain why some lines go up and others don’t, which can be very suscpetible to one’s political views, when in reality there is a sophisticated machinery, that when explained step-by-step does seem to to be logically tractable to most people, behind the scenes. I’m not a complete optimist in that I know some groups are already completely entrenched in their beliefs, and at the end of the day, I don’t think that the divide will ever completely dissapear but I’m sure we can get in a better place than we are in right now. Relative to a field like medicin or quantum physics, there are many ways to contextualize the complexities in econ in an approchable manner and the topics are things that mostly do have a tangible impact that is easy to point out.
On the other hand, I have now also come to develop a respect towards the way economics is communicated. I think it takes a special skill to be able to be aware of all the intricate dynamics at play and focus on the important factors or summarize this immensly complex network of relationships in a few sentences. Its something I defintely am not able to do well right now, but I am slowly getting there. I respect a lot of the economists here at the NY FED (and other big names who are good at communicating to outside of the academia bubble) since having started working here, but I still have my own additional ideas of how to better communicate ideas to help bridge the gap between polarized sides.
I personally want to develop this communication skill as well. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how, for readers who are not in econ, the full econ themed blog posts really seem to lose them. Although I definitely won’t stop writing those types of posts (since those posts are the actual reason why I had an urge to write out my thoughts in blog format in the first place), I do want to put out more posts that try to bridge the gap between the economics that I interact with on a daily basis and something more easily understood by someone not in econ in a way where the rigour of the underlying analysis is communicated well. To know that when I say I think “The changes in thing A causes effect B”, it is understood that my reasoning is drawn out from a lot more than a few sentences of qualitative logic.
As a final disclaimer, all this is not to say that econ doesn’t have its problems with inherently biased work. Yes, there are assumptions that have to be made to make the math/statistics work. Yes, there are many choices about why a model is built one way or the other. Yes, not every paper is constructed over the same dataset and the choice of which data to use in itself introduced bias. But in my personal experience, the rational for these decisions that must be made aren’t often related to political partisan lines. My main point is to say that I don’t think that economics is as strictly partisan in academia, and therefore people should not be as distrusting of opinions that do not align with themselves, as people consider it to be. It is very true that I am not the definitive voice of what goes on in all parts of academia, but I definitely do have a lot of restored faith in the Fed relative to my thoughts as an undergraduate student.