Welcome to my blog! I am an academic economist, but professional writing for a specialized audience gets old given enough years. Academic writing has always run against my generalist tendencies because I am interested in too many different subjects. I have recently grown interested in writing about economics for a broad audience, instead of trying to communicate exclusively with economists. I disagree with many of them on most things anyway. A “generalist” approach to economics will, I hope, help me accomplish this.
Why generalist? In order to confront the major global crises we face today – climate change, public health, inequality, and technological change, for example – a good general understanding of economics is crucially important. As is a solid background in the liberal arts. Economics is, in many ways, linked to science, politics, philosophy, history, culture, and other areas. Through this blog, I hope to engage in productive dialog with others – even other amenable economists – and contribute to a greater appreciation that, despite its frequently immense complexity, much of economics is little more than common sense.
Economics is indeed a misunderstood subject, so another of my goals is to help “demystify” it. While it is true that becoming an economist requires good command of mathematics, understanding economics really requires little or even no math. People in my profession tend to be fond of using abstract mathematical models to analyze problems. Such tools have, over the years elevated the prestige of economics, placing it alongside the natural sciences in terms of its rigor and precision. I’ll even admit that I enjoy math and understand the appeal of modeling.
But as economics has grown increasingly abstract and mathematical, it has become less and less accessible – never mind relevant – to ordinary people. Worse, because it is impossible to capture the rich complexity of many contemporary economic problems in a simple mathematical model, the workability of the model itself has been dictating whether a problem or question is “interesting.” (Talk about putting the cart before the horse!) Critics today justifiably deride economics for having detached itself from the real world.
Many also misunderstand economics at a different level. In my experience, many college students begin their studies believing that economics is primarily about money. So, one of my challenges as a teacher is disabusing them of this notion. “Yes,” I tell them, “money is important; but economics is about so much more (people, jobs, production, satisfaction, just to name a few things). Money is not the essence – it is a mere facilitator.” Even some of my work colleagues fail to appreciate the difference between finance and economics. Finance is specialized. Economics alone offers a broad-based foundation for understanding how the world really works. Perhaps uniquely, it in many ways connects a broad variety of different disciplines (I will expand on this idea in future posts). Which is why I think that a generalist perspective is indispensable to a proper understanding of how economies function. Hence the moniker “The Economic Generalist.”