A Problem of Specialization

Kartik Athreya, who is a senior economist in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, has written a short paper called “Economics is Hard. Don’t Let Bloggers Tell You Otherwise.” It might be summed up like this: Economics, especially macroeconomics, is extremely difficult and requires lots of careful, detailed, and specialized work, which does not lend well to broad and pithy pronouncements about policy; nobody should pay any attention to economic writing unless it appears in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal.

I do not doubt the accuracy of his assessment, but  similar things could be said about most fields of scholarship, which appears to leave us in a bad situation for public participation. Many people want to know and understand how the world works, so they try to learn by reading and discussing out here in the real world—not in a university, or in the Research Department of a Federal Reserve Bank. Athreya refers to them dismissively and almost derisively as “auto-didacts.” But he still acknowledges that the general public does have an appetite for knowledge and understanding of specialized fields like economics. So after we poor, curious “auto-didacts” have done some reading, and we want to talk about what we’ve read, but we’re not university professors, graduate students, or employed in a similar scholarly capacity, what exactly are we supposed to do? Keep it to ourselves?

For all thirteen of you regular readers, you probably know that I generally avoid blogging about economics. I do read quite a lot about it, and have left economics-related comments on Facebook and elsewhere, but I would never dare to call myself even the slightest bit competent in economics (which is why one of the books on my desk is Economics for Dummies). Economics is important, however, both for the specific knowledge its practitioners impart and for their approach to thinking about complex problems. And when economic knowledge is deployed by the government and by Federal Reserve Banks in pursuit of specific policy goals, an informed public in a nation with participatory government has an obligation to turn autodidactic and to discuss economics. Otherwise, we are left in the hands of a priesthood of elites with an education that they themselves have deemed sufficient both to hold forth on matters of dire importance and to call for silence from the rest of us, as Athreya does.

I have no delusion that the majority of the public understands the depth and complexity of economics—or science, medicine, engineering, or law; I can be found lamenting the practiced ignorance and merciless stupidity of the general population almost daily. But everyone, regardless of intelligence or education, should be trying to understand and talk about these matters. If that means going on blogs and saying things that are inaccurate or even “incoherent or misleading,” or risking—gasp!—that they will not “meaningfully advance the discussion on economic policy,” as Athreya fears, then that’s just too bad. It is part of the price we pay for free speech and participatory government.

Which is where Athreya, like every other I-got-mine-now-you-shut-up holder of a Ph.D., while he correctly observes that specialists have specialized knowledge and training, takes a wrong turn for freedom and participatory government. People, no matter how stupid or ignorant we may be, need to discuss important matters amongst ourselves, whether on blogs or elsewhere. If we left everything to specialists and ignored the public, we would no longer have participatory government, but simple technocracy. And no matter how well the specialists and technocrats “police” themselves with peer-reviewed journals, no matter how enlightened they may be, no matter how important it should be for the rest of us to inform our views by the knowledge they have gleaned, the American public should not yield, wholly and uncritically, to the technocrats—as Athreya seems to suggest, without actually saying so. (He backpedals a little in his penultimate sentence: “Economics is full of . . . ‘if-then’ knowledge, which, if communicated well, could significantly sharpen the public discussion.” I’ve said legal professionals and scholars need to communicate more clearly, too, but Athreya never really contradicts the summary in his abstract: “non-economist bloggers . . . should be ignored by an open-minded lay public.” Ignored? There are plenty of yahoos saying stupid things about all sorts of issues online, but they shouldn’t be ignored; they should be confronted—that’s the marketplace of ideas.)

Athreya’s essay is shot through with the standard stuff about how he labors at his scholarship without recognition, and he has paid his dues to earn “some, but hardly overwhelming, success” at publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and those reviewers are just “scathing,” and, oh, that scholarly suffering should substantially enhance his credibility! He half-heartedly tries to qualify his views by limiting them to bloggers and others that portray economics “as a simple enterprise with clear conclusions,” but one is left wondering, then, how people are supposed to talk about economics when, despite that lack of simplicity or clarity, economists are called upon to inform actual policies and laws. If all those non-economists in government (i.e., Senators, Representatives, the President, etc.) are drawing real conclusions from an enterprise that is “almost pathologically riddled by dynamic considerations and feedback effects,” as Athreya puts it, but non-economists out in the public who have a real, day-to-day stake in the outcomes of those policies and laws should be “ignored” when they enter the marketplace of ideas, then how exactly is that qualification supposed to mean anything at all? Why, for example, should the President be allowed to take concrete action recommended by economists who advise him, while the rest of us are required to hold our peace in the uncertain shadows of economic scholars, or be ignored?

Yes, we have lots of specialists in our society. Yes, when we approach subjects of specialized knowledge, we should see what the specialists think. We are not bound to agree with them, however, nor are we required to keep our mouths shut if we have something to say about what they tell us. Yes, that results in a high level of “noise” on the internet. But if ordinary people cannot be trusted—or at least urged, expected, and prodded—to assess the reliability of their sources, or to address, defend, and revise the premises of their conclusions, then free speech means nothing.

Specialists are valuable and the results of their research should be given appropriate weight and authority. Even so, everyone is mostly ignorant about almost everything, while specialists are only a little less ignorant about a few things. And you should see it that way; anyone with lots of education can tell you that the more you know, the more you realize we don’t know, and even Athreya admits that, after 17 years as a specialist, “I still feel ill at ease with my grasp of many issues.” (So why is he so sure that non-specialists should be “ignored”? He claims not to be and admits that some non-specialists have “brilliant” ideas, but says that is “irrelevant” to his argument. Maybe it takes a different kind of specialist to reconcile his conflicted views.)

I have no doubt that Kartik Athreya is a smart guy who could run circles around me in economics. But his essay could have said what it needed to say more clearly and more effectively: Economists have valuable insights to offer the public discourse, so they should do a better job of educating the public about economics. Forget all that stuff about the silent suffering of academic scholarship, ignoring idiot bloggers, and blaming all those non-specialists for muddying the waters; if economists are frustrated by ignorance about economics, that’s their own damned fault. (And, to be sure, I have said the same thing about the legal profession. See, e.g., Respecters, Venters, and Know-It-Alls: “[W]e in the legal profession have apparently done a piss-poor job of educating the general public about the law, leaving that task instead to wingnuts on talk radio and other promulgators of ill-informed half-truths.”)

To be fair, one could read Athreya’s essay as saying, ultimately, what I suggest it ought to say. But if that’s what he meant to say, then he didn’t say it well or clearly. Instead, it sounds like he just wants the public to pay more attention to people like him—those long-suffering holders of Ph.D.s laboring in obscurity—and less attention to loudmouthed bloggers that haven’t paid the same dues he has. If that’s what he wants, then maybe he should start writing more accessible papers, or push for easier (and cheaper) availability of peer-reviewed articles for the non-specialist public, instead of demanding that bloggers be “ignored.”

At any rate, I would rather live in a world where an army of relentless autodidacts perpetually irritates the upper echelons of specialty scholars than one where the scholars do all the talking and the rest of us just shut up and listen.