Conversable Economist

To be clear, Nyhan describes misperceptions as \”belief in claims that can be shown to be false (for example, that Osama bin Laden is still alive) or unsupported by convincing and systematic evidence (for example, that vaccines cause autism).\” Thus, he isn\’t talking about issues of shading or emphasis. Nyhan writes: \”Misperceptions present a serious problem, but claims that we live in a `post-truth\’ society with widespread consumption of `fake news\’ are not empirically supported and should not be used to support interventions that threaten democratic values.\” 

So why is the belief that everyone on the other side of the political fence is subject to dramatic misperceptions so widespread. One reason is that both academic research and examples of that research in the media tend to focus on examples with partisan distinctions. 

Public beliefs in such claims are frequently associated with people’s candidate preferences and partisanship. One December 2016 poll found that 62 percent of Trump supporters endorsed the baseless claim that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election, compared to 25 percent of supporters of Hillary Clinton (Frankovic 2016). Conversely, 50 percent of Clinton voters endorsed the false claim that Russia tampered with vote tallies to help Trump, compared to only 9 percent of Trump voters. But not all political misperceptions have a clear partisan valence: for example, 17 percent of Clinton supporters and 15 percent of Trump supporters in the same poll said the US government helped plan the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

One of my favorite examples is a study which showed respondents pictures of the Inauguration Day crowds for  President Obama in 2009 and President Trump in 2017.: \”When the pictures were unlabeled, there was broad agreement that the Obama crowd was larger, but when the pictures were labelled, many Trump supporters looked at the pictures and indicated that Trump’ crowd was larger, an obviously false claim that the authors refer to as `expressive responding.\’” (I love the term \”expressive responding.\”)

Sometimes that people are aware of slanting their answers in this way. When people give these kinds of answers to poll questions, they often know (and will say when asked) that some of their answers are based on less evidence than others. One study offered small financial incentives (like $1) for accurate answers, and found that the partisan divide was reduce by more than 50%.  

But other times, people make meaningful real-world decisions based on these kinds of partisan feelings. as one example with particular relevance just now, evidence from the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations suggests that when the president you supported is in office, people \”express more trust in vaccine safety and greater intention to vaccinate themselves and their children than opposition partisans,\” which shows up in actual patterns of school vaccinations. 

An underlying pattern that comes up in this research is that if people are exposed to an concept many times (an example is the false statement “The Atlantic Ocean is the largest ocean on Earth”), they become more likely to rate it as true. The underlying psychology here seems to be that when a claim seems familiar to people, because of repeated prior exposure, they become more likely to view it as true. An implication here is that while those who marinate themselves in social media discussions of news may be more likely to think of themselves as well-informed, they are also probably more likely to have severe misperceptions. Indeed, people who are more knowledgeable are also the same people who have become aware of how to deploy counterarguments so that they believe their misperceptions even more strongly. 

Nyhan\’s paper mentions many intriguing studies along these lines. But do we need public action to fight misperceptions? It\’s not clear that we do. A common finding in these studies is that if someone discovers and admits that they have a misperception on a certain issue, it doesn\’t actually change their partisan beliefs.  \”Fact-checking\” websites have some use, but they can also be another way of expressing partisanship–and those who hold misperceptions most strongly are not likely to be reading fact-checking sites, anyway. Even general warnings about \”fake news\” can backfire. Some research suggests that when people are warned about fake news, they become skeptical of all news, not just part of it. One interesting study warned a random selection of candidates in nine states who were running for office in 2012 that the reputational effects of being called out by fact-checkers could be severe, and found that candidates who received the warnings were less likely to have their accuracy publicly challenged. 

Nyhan concludes with this response to suggestions for more severe and perhaps government-based interventions against misperceptions: 

Calls for such draconian interventions are commonly fueled by a moral panic over claims that “fake news” has created a supposedly “post-truth” era. These claims falsely suggest an earlier fictitious golden age in which political debate was based on facts and truth. In reality, false information, misperceptions, and conspiracy theories are general features of human society. For instance, belief that John F. Kennedy was killed in a conspiracy were already widespread by the late 1960s and 1970s (Bowman and Rugg 2013). Hofstadter (1964) goes further, showing that a “paranoid style” of conspiratorial thinking recurs in American political culture going back to the country’s founding. Moreover, exposure to the sorts of untrustworthy websites that are often called “fake news” was actually quite limited for most Americans during the 2016 campaign—far less than media accounts suggest (Guess, Nyhan, and Reifler 2020). In general, no systematic evidence exists to demonstrate that the prevalence of misperceptions today (while worrisome) is worse than in the past.

Or as I sometimes say, perhaps the reason for disagreement isn\’t that the other side has been gulled and deceived, and if they just learned the real true facts then they would agree with you. Maybe the most common reason for disagreement is that people actually disagree.

Here, I want to focus instead on a different set of changes that have been happening since 2012: specifically, changes in how the Fed sees the long-run future of the US economy. To put it another way, when short-run fluctuations work themselves out, where is the US economy headed? In his speech describing the Fed\’s new policy statement, Fed chair Jerome Powell (\”New Economic Challenges and the Fed\’s Monetary Policy Review, August 27, 2020) described how the Fed\’s view have been shifting toward an expectation of slower long-run growth.

From Powell\’s speech, Here are some estimates of long-run economic growth from the Federal Open Market Committee (the committee within the Fed that sets monetary policy), as well as the private forecast summarized by the Blue Chip indicators and the Congressional Budget Office. Eight years ago, it was common to think that long-run growth in real US GDP would be about 2.5%; now, the long-run growth rates is more commonly estimated at 1.75%.

It\’s worth remembering that these growth rates are annual, and accumulate over time. Thus, a seemingly small difference in growth rates of 0.75%, accumulated over a decade, will mean a GDP that is about 7.5% smaller at that time. In very round numbers, the US GDP would be $2 trillion smaller in a decade as a result of this slower growth rate–which in turn means lower average incomes and less tax revenue for the government.

Another big shift is an expectation of a lower unemployment rate. Back in 2012, the common belief was that the unemployment rate wouldn\’t fall much lower than 6%; now, the sense is that it will eventually fall to about 4%. 

Powell also points out that the Fed believes interest rates have fallen around the world. The Fed calculates a \”neutral\” interest rate–that is, the interest rate which emerges from supply and demand and isn\’t either a stimulant or a drag on the economy in the long run. Powell says (footnotes and references to figures omitted): 

[T]he general level of interest rates has fallen both here in the United States and around the world. Estimates of the neutral federal funds rate, which is the rate consistent with the economy operating at full strength and with stable inflation, have fallen substantially … This rate is not affected by monetary policy but instead is driven by fundamental factors in the economy, including demographics and productivity growth—the same factors that drive potential economic growth. The median estimate from FOMC participants of the neutral federal funds rate has fallen by nearly half since early 2012, from 4.25 percent to 2.5 percent.

As Powell points out, the lower interest rate means that the Fed has less power to stimulate the economy by reducing interest rates–because the interest rate is already closer to zero percent. Powell writes: \”This decline in assessments of the neutral federal funds rate has profound implications for monetary policy. With interest rates generally running closer to their effective lower bound even in good times, the Fed has less scope to support the economy during an economic downturn by simply cutting the federal funds rate.\”

In my own view, these changes in beliefs about the long-run direction of the US economy have at least two main implications. One is that a serious economic agenda for the future needs to focus on how to improve productivity and long-run economic growth. Another is that when (not if) the economy goes bad the next time, the Federal Reserve will be in a weakened position to provide assistance, so thinking in advance about what policies could kick in very quickly seems worth consideration. 

[This essay was originally published back in 2016, but it seemed worth revisiting with some minor updates on this Labor Day holiday.] 

A majority of Americans do not consider themselves to be \”engaged\” with their jobs. According to Gallup polling, the share of US workers who viewed themselves as \”engaged\” in their jobs had risen to 35% in 2019, while 52% were \”not engaged\” and 13% were \”actively disengaged.\” One suspects this level of engagement will drop after the pandemic recession. 

What makes a \”good job\” or an engaging job? The classic research on this seems to come from the Job Characteristics Theory put forward by Greg R. Oldham and J. Richard Hackman back in a series of papers written in the the 1970s: for an overview, a useful starting point is their 1980 book Work Redesign. Here, I\’ll focus on their 2010 article in the Journal of Organizational Behavior summarizing some findings from this line of research over time, \”Not what it was and not what it will be: The future of job design research\” (31: pp. 463–479).

Oldham and Hackman point out that from the time when Adam Smith described making pins and back in the eighteenth century up through when Frederick W. Taylor led a wave of industrial engineers doing time-and-motions studies of workplace activities in the early 20th century, and up through the assembly line as viewed by companies like General Motors and Ford, the concept of job design focused on the division of labor. In my own view, the job design efforts of this period tended to view workers as robots that carried out a specified set of physical tasks, and the problem was how to make those worker-robots more effective.

Whatever the merits of this view for its place and time, it has clearly become outdated in the last half-century or so. Even in assembly-line work, companies like Toyota that cross-trained workers for a variety of different jobs, including on-the-spot quality control, developed much higher productivity than their US counterparts. And for the swelling numbers of service-related and information-related jobs, the idea of an extreme division of labor, micro-managed at every stage, often seemed somewhere between irrelevant and counterproductive. When worker motivation matters, the question of how to design a \”good job\” has a different focus.

By the 1960s, Frederick Herzberg is arguing that jobs often need to be enriched, rather than simplified. In the 1970s, Oldham and Hackman develop their Job Characteristics Theory, which they describe in the 2010 article like this:

We eventually settled on five ‘‘core’’ job characteristics: Skill variety (i.e., the degree to which the job requires a variety of different activities in carrying out the work, involving the use of a number of different skills and talents of the person), task identity (i.e., the degree to which the job requires doing a whole and identifiable piece of work from beginning to end), task significance (i.e., the degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the lives of other people, whether those people are in the immediate
organization or the world at large), autonomy (i.e., the degree to which the job provides substantial freedom, independence, and discretion to the individual in scheduling the work and in determining the procedures to be used in carrying it out), and job-based feedback (i.e., the degree to which carrying out the work activities required by the job provides the individual with direct and clear information about the effectiveness of his or her performance).

Each of the first three of these characteristics, we proposed, would contribute to the experienced meaningfulness of the work. Having autonomy would contribute to jobholders felt responsibility for work outcomes. And built-in feedback, of course, would provide direct knowledge of the results of the work. When these three psychological states were present—that is, when jobholders experienced the work to be meaningful, felt personally responsible for outcomes, and had knowledge of the results of their work—they would become internally motivated to perform well. And, just as importantly, they would not be able to give themselves a psychological pat on the back for performing well if the work were devoid of meaning, or if they were merely following someone else’s required procedures, or if doing the work generated no information about how well they were performing.

So we incorporated two individual differences into our model—growth need strength (i.e., the degree to which an individual values opportunities for personal growth and development at work) and job-relevant knowledge and skill. Absent the former, a jobholder would not seek or respond to the internal ‘‘kick’’ that comes from succeeding on a challenging task, and without the latter the jobholder would experience more failure than success, never a motivating state of affairs.

There has been a considerable amount of follow-up work on this approach: for an overview, interested readers might begin with the other essays in the same 2010 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior that contains the Oldham-Hackman essay. Their overview of this work emphasizes a number of ways in which the typical job has evolved during the last 40 years. They describe the change in this way:

It is true that many specific, well-defined jobs continue to exist in contemporary organizations. But we presently are in the midst of what we believe are fundamental changes in the relationships among people, the work they do, and the organizations for which they do it. Now individuals may telecommute rather than come to the office or plant every morning. They may be responsible for balancing among several different activities and responsibilities, none of which is defined as their main job. They may work in temporary teams whose membership shifts as work requirements change. They may be independent contractors, managing simultaneously temporary or semi-permanent relationships with multiple enterprises. They may serve on a project team whose other members come from different organizations—suppliers, clients or organizational partners. They may be required to market their services within their own organizations, with no single boss, no home organizational unit, and no assurance of long-term employment. Even managers are not immune to the changes. For example, they may be members of a leadership team that is responsible for a large number of organizational activities rather than occupy a well-defined role as the sole leader of any one unit or function.

In their essay, Oldham and Hackman run through a number of ways in which jobs have evolved in ways that they did not expect or undervalued back in the 1970s. For example, they argue that the opportunities for enrichment in front-line jobs is larger than they expected, that they undervalued the

social aspects of jobs, that they didn\’t anticipate the \”job crafting\” phenomenon in which jobs are shaped by workers and employers rather than being firmly specified. They point out that although working in teams has become a phenomenon, employers and workers are not always clear on the different kinds of teams that are possible: for example, \”surgical teams\” led by one person with support; \”co-acting teams\” in which people act individually, but have little need to interact face-to-face; \”face-to-face teams\” that meet regularly as a group to combine expertise; \”distributed teams\” that can draw on a very wide level of expertise when needed, but don\’t have a lot of interdependence or a need to meet with great regularity; and even \”sand dune\” teams that are constantly remaking and re-forming themselves with changing memberships and management.

When you start thinking about \”good jobs\” in these broader terms, the challenge of creating good jobs for a 21st century economy becomes more complex. A good job has what economists have called an element of \”gift exchange,\” which means that a motivated worker stands ready to offer some extra effort and energy beyond the bare minimum, while a motivated employer stands ready to offer their workers at all skill levels some extra pay, training, and support beyond the bare minimum. A good job has a degree of stability and predictability in the present, along with prospects for growth of skills and corresponding pay raises in the future. We want good jobs to be available at all skill levels, so that there is a pathway in the job market for those with little experience or skill to work their way up. But in the current economy, the average time spent at a given job is declining and on-the-job training is in decline.

I certainly don\’t expect that we will ever reach a future in which jobs will be all about deep internal fulfillment, with a few giggles and some comradeship tossed in. As my wife and I remind each other when one of us has an especially tough day at the office, there\’s a reason they call it \”work,\” which is closely related to the reason that you get paid for doing it.

But along with a concern for how quickly jobs will return in the aftermath of the pandemic recession, a primary long-term issue in the workforce is how to encourage the economy to develop more good jobs. I don\’t have a well-designed agenda to offer here. But what\’s needed goes well beyond our standard public arguments about whether firms should be required to offer certain minimum levels of wages and benefits.

One example comes from T.H. White, in his 1958 retelling of the Arthurian legend in Once and Future King. The wizard Merlin is teaching the young bow who would become King Arthur, but at this point in the story is known as the Wart. White writes:

I always liked Wart\’s down-to-earth and so-very-human rejoinder. 

US government debt is exploding in size. The Congressional Budget Office lays out the patterns in \”An Update to the Budget Outlook: 2020 to 2030\” (September 2020). As usual, the baseline CBO estimates are based on currently existing law–for example, they do not take into account additional debt that would be incurred if one more fiscal stimulus bill was to pass before the election. Thus, the CBO estimates are focused on the large short-term spike in spending has already been legislated. Here\’s the pattern of total revenues and spending. 

That sharp spike in spending is being matched by a much larger annual budget deficit. The orange line shows the projection from March 2020; the darker line shows the change. Again, you\’ll notice that the CBO forecast is essentially for a short-term blip. But the deficit is going to be much larger than it had been back in Great Recession of 2007-9, which in turn was much larger than the deficits from back in the 1980s. 

Overall US government borrowing, using the standard metric of total federal debt held by the public, was already on a path to rise sharply in the next decade or so, but the 2020 rise in spending has accelerated that timetable. The highest debt/GDP ratio in US history was previously in 1946, with the spike from the borrowed money used to finance the military efforts of World War II. The US economy is now on track to break through that level in 2023, and then to remain at that higher level of debt.

As always, one can question whether the standard measurements given here capture the present moment. For example, the CBO notes that although federal debt held by the public is the standard measure of debt, one can make a case for subtracting out the portion of federal debt that is used to finance student loans: after all, one might think of this as money that is \”really\” borrowed by students, who are the ones who need to repay it, just using the federal government as a conduit. One might also make a case for not counting federal debt that is purchased and held by the Federal Reserve system, on the grounds that this federal borrowing does not have the same effect on credit markets as if the money was borrowed directly from the public.  For example, from 2019 to 2020 the standard debt/GDP ratio rises from 79.2% to 98.2%. However, if one subtracts out student debt and takes into account that about three-quarters of the federal debt issued in 2020 has been purchased by the Fed, the ratio rises 60.6% of GDP in 2019 to 65% of GDP in 2020. But by any of these measures, there is still a sharp rise in federal deb in the next decade. 

What are the risks of this fiscal path and what have other countries done when confronted with historically high and rising debt levels? In a report earlier this year, the CBO listed the main concerns: 

We are two decades into the twenty-first century, and we have now had two once-in-a-century economic events: the Great Recession of 2007-9 and now the pandemic recession that started in March. Right now, addressing federal debt is far from the main public policy concern. But when that time comes (and it\’s starting to look more like \”when\” than \”if\”), how do countries bring down their debt burden? 

Carmen M. Reinhart and M. Belen Sbrancia look at the historical patterns in \”The Liquidation of Government Debt\” (January 2015, IMF Working Paper WP/15/7). They summarize: 

Throughout history, debt/GDP ratios have been reduced by (i) economic growth; (ii) substantive fiscal adjustment/austerity plans; (iii) explicit default or restructuring of private and/or public debt; (iv) a surprise burst in inflation; and (v) a steady dosage of financial repression accompanied by an equally steady dosage of inflation.

This post is not the place to discuss these choices in any detail. But just to state the obvious, the US economy has not been more prone to slow productivity than to periods of rapid economic growth in recent decades; the US political system has been unwilling to restructure big spending programs like Medicare and Social Security; a large-scale restructuring or default on US debt seems like a highly unlikely last resort; and US inflation has been stuck at low levels for 25 years now, for reasons not fully understood. Thus, I suspect the US economy may be headed, by fits and starts, to a period of what Reinhart and Sbrancia call \”financial repression.\” By this term, they mean a set of policies that invole much greater government management of the financial sector, including policies that  focus on keeping interest rates very low and also limit other options available to investors–so that the government will find it easier to keep borrowing at low interest rates. 

Here\’s a figure showing historical data on annual hours per worker for the US and four European economies. You can see the dramatic fall in annual hours worked in all of these countries in the opening decades of the 20th century.  From the 1950s into the 1960s, the blue US line for annual hours per worker is below the other countries. But by the late 1970s, the US line is above the others, and the gap between the US and the other countries shown here seems to be rising in recent years. 

An additional factor is while annual hours worked per years is discussed here on a per worker basis, the entry of women into the (paid) labor force in the last half-century or so means that more two-parent households and two earners, and more single-parent households have someone working full-time. For the household, these shifts make time feel tighter, too. 

What sort of policies are might achieve this goal? Here are some of their suggestions.  

1) \”One clear approach to reducing overwork for the middle class is to simply extend current overtime protections to more middle-income workers. Current federal regulations exempt employees who meet certain duties tests and earn more than $35,648 per year; the threshold was raised from $23,660 at the beginning of 2020. While the 2020 increase extended overtime protection to an estimated 1.3 million workers, it falls short of restoring nearly half a century of decline. If the 1975 threshold had been adjusted for inflation, it would now be over $50,000. Additionally, better enforcement is needed to ensure that nonexempt workers are compensated for their time as required by current law.\”

2) \”[I]t may be time to consider a shorter standard workweek by reducing the federal standard from 40 hours per week to 35. … Reducing the federal standard is not a mandate; it would not prevent individuals from working more than 35 hours per week. It would simply nudge employers in that direction by making it more expensive to keep people on the job for over 35 hours a week …\”

3) \”[O]ne option would be to require U.S. employers to offer a minimum of four weeks (20 days) per year of Paid Time Off (PTO) to all full-time employees, with a prorated amount for part-time employees. PTO could be used for vacation, short-term illness, family care, or other reasons at workers’ discretion. …  One limitation of this approach is that employees may not use the additional leave benefits that are available to them, especially if they worry that they will face negative employment consequences. Fewer than half of American workers used all of their PTO days in 2018, leaving a total of 768 million days unused, according to the U.S. Travel Association. … This problem could be addressed by requiring employers to compensate employees for unused leave, as is already the case in some states, such as Nebraska and Massachusetts. Such a requirement would allow workers to choose between working less and earning more (through a payout for unused time) in addition to incentivizing employers to promote vacation-taking.\” 

4) Design social insurance for mid-life breaks from work? \”We may also want to reallocate work over the lifecycle, as proposed by Isabel Sawhill in her book, The Forgotten Americans: An Economic Agenda for A Divided Nation. … [W]orking-age families are now spending more total time in market work due primarily to the rise of dual earners. Further, work and family responsibilities tend to peak at the same life stage, with the result that adults between the ages of 30 and 44 spend about twice as much time in combined market and nonmarket work (including family care) as those between 70 and 84. In short, the elderly, especially the “young elderly” who are still healthy, are the new leisured class. … These developments suggest the need to reinvent social insurance for the modern era by freeing up some time in midlife to raise children, enable people to retrain, or make a fresh start with a new business or a new career, instead of saving all of our nonworking years for retirement. For these reasons Sawhill proposes to expand social insurance to cover new benefits for these kinds of midlife career breaks. In exchange, and to help cover the costs, she proposes to raise retirement ages, consistent with people’s longer and healthier lives.\”

5) Formalize telecommuting arrangements? \”One employer practice that would help is to formalize work-from-home arrangements and give employees the right to request to work remotely without facing negative employment consequences. In some contexts, this could be good for employers and employees: a growing body of research indicates that telecommuting can improve job satisfaction and raise productivity, in addition to reducing emissions and spreading work to more remote regions.\”

Change the standard federal workweek from 40 to 35 hours over time–which in effect means that employers would need to pay overtime rates above 35 hours worked. 

Sawhill and Guyot are clear in acknowledging the tradeoff that working fewer hours is also likely to mean lower pay. Thus, they suggest that changes like this could be phased in over time: for example, your annual raise for the next few years might be smaller, but your paid vacation time would be expanding. But more broadly, their point is that the annual and weekly hours worked by those in any country are not written on stone tablets, nor are they the result of a pure market negotiations. Hours worked are shaped by laws and norms. They have changed in the past, and could be changed again. 

A passage that always makes me grin is Orwell\’s rendition of Ecclesiastes into ponderous bureaucratic/academic prose. Orwell writes (ital type inserted): 

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one. … It will be seen that I have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases ‘success or failure in competitive activities’. This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains forty-nine words but only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

Later in the essay, Orwell proposes an attractively short list of rules to keep in mind as a writer:

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article.

When reading Orwell or some other maestro of expository prose tell me how it should be done, I remember the wonderful line in the Dylan Thomas prose-poem, A Child\’s Christmas in Wales, where he is remembering the kinds of gifts that children receive, and refers to: \”Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo!\” In a similar spirit, when trying to absorb writing advice from those who have mastered the craft, I mutter to myself: \”Easy for Leonardo.\”

A.C. Pigou offers not a definition of economics, but rather an account of the source of economics as a field of interest,  near the start of his classic 1920 book, The Economics of Welfare. He writes: 

It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science.

Here\’s the quotation in its fuller orotund context: 

When a man sets out upon any course of inquiry, the object of his search may be either light or fruit–either knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for the sake of good things to which it leads. … But there will, I think, be general agreement that in the sciences of human society, be their appeal as bearers of light never so high, it is the promise of fruit and not of light that chiefly merits our regard. There is a celebrated, if somewhat too strenuous, passage in Macaulay\’s Essay on History: \”No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it is valuable, only as it leads us to form just calculations with regard to the future. A history which does not serve this purpose, though it may be filled with battles, treaties, and commotions, is as useless as the series of turnpike tickets collected by Sir Matthew Mite.

Sir Matthew Mite is the leading character in Samuel Foote\’s 1772 play The Nabob; a comedy, in Three Acts (1772). Mite is an avaricious and corrupt character who worked for the East India Company in India, got rich doing so, and has now returned to England. Pigou continues: 

That paradox is partly true. If it were not for the hope that a scientific study of man\’s social actions may lead, not necessarily directly or immediately, but at some time and in some way, to practical results of social improvement, not a few students of these actions would regard the time devoted to their study as time misspent. That is true of all social sciences, but especially true of economics. For economics is \”a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life\”; and it is not in the ordinary business of life that mankind is most interesting or inspiring. 

\”The ordinary business of life\” is the famous definition of economics from the work of Alfred Marshall\’s 1890 Principles of Economics. Marshall was Pigou\’s teacher, and also his predecessor at Cambridge. Pigou continues: 

I would quibble with Pigou\’s formulation. In my own view, the \”ordinary\” actions of people earning an income, supporting families, opening up possibilities for consumption and pursuing their interests, and saving for the future offer deep insights into people as they really are. In many cases, the \”ordinary\” actions of people are intertwined with love and sacrifice for families, friends, and communities. I am suspicious of a claim that I learn more about human nature from martyrdom than from someone\’s efforts to build a career and support their family. I do have a sense of \”wonder\” in contemplating the workings of a decentralized economy. I am congenitally suspicious of those who want economics to offer a justification for their own preferred shortcut to the fruits of economic gain, without sufficient consideration of how their proposals will interact with the lives of \”ordinary\” people. But Pigou\’s formulation also has obvious merit, in that many economists have in fact been drawn to the field by a desire to improve social conditions, and in a recognition that a lack of economic activity and opportunities for economic participation can lead to mean streets and withered lives. 

Academic specialization has its tradeoffs. On one side, extreme specialization and focus helps to develop insights and discoveries that would otherwise be  unlikely to occur. On the other side, it\’s possible, as the old saying goes, to know more and more about less and less until you end up knowing everything about nothing. Recognizing this tradeoff isn\’t a new insight, but it has rarely been addressed with more grace than by the economist Jacob Viner in a speech entitled \”A Modest Proposal for Some Stress on Scholarship in Graduate Training,\” given at the Graduate Convocation at Brown University on June 3, 1950, and then published a few yeas later in the Quarterly Journal of Speech (February 1954, 40:1, pp. 15-23). 

Viner\’s talk is the source of one of my own favorite comments about academic graduate training: \”Men are not narrow in their intellec­tual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end.\”

Viner is a very prominent economist who does highly specialized work, and who values the specialized work done by others. Thus, he strives to be both mild but definite in his praise of broader scholarship. He offer a number of wry observations along the way. Here\’s a comment on academic specialization: 

This is the ever-growing specialization not on­ly as between departments but even within departments, a specialization car­ried so far that very often professors within even the same department can scarcely communicate with each other on intellectual matters except through the mediation at seminars and doctoral examinations of their as yet incomplete­ly specialized students. This develop­ment has not been capricious or without function. The growth in the accumula­tion of data, in the refinement and deli­cacy of tools for their analysis so that great application and concentration are necessary for mastery of their use, has not only ended the day of the polymath with all knowledge for his province, but seems steadily to be cutting down the number of those who would sacrifice even an inch of depth of knowledge for a mile of breadth. 

Viner suggests making some room for \”scholarship,\” by which he does not mean the addition of even more specialized work. He said:

A small place once given to scholarship, moreover, I would not object if it were then confined to its allotted space, or at least not permitted to spread with­out restraint into areas beyond its prop­er jurisdiction, where if it intrudes it steals time and other less valuable resources from what are generally acknowl­edged to be more important activities. A verger of a church, reproved for lock­ing the doors of the church, replied that when they were left open it often re­sulted in people praying all over the place. I concede that we don\’t want students and faculty unrestrainedly pur­suing scholarship all over our universi­ties while they have so much more ur­gent business to attend to. 

One virtue of scholarship is that it will help teaching, especially undergraduate teaching. Viner writes: 

The graduate schools, I repeat, tend to mould their students into narrow spe­cialists, who see only from the point of view of their subject, or of a special branch of their special subject, and fail to recognize the importance of looking even at their own subject from other than its own point of view. These stud­ents then acquire their doctoral degrees on the strength of theses which have demonstrated to the satisfaction of their supervisors that they have adequately decontaminated their minds from any influences surviving from their undergraduate training in other fields than those occupied by their chosen disci­pline. They then find their way back to the colleges to transmit to the next gen­eration the graduate school version of a liberal education, or how to see the world through the eye of a needle …

Men are not narrow in their intellec­tual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end. And men who have been trained to think only within the limits of one subject, will never make teachers at the college level even in that subject. They may know exceedingly well the possibilities of that subject, but they will never be conscious of its limi­tations, or if conscious of them will never have an adequate motive or a good basis for judging as to their consequence or extent. 

A broader virtue of scholarship, Viner argues, is that it provides a context for satisfaction with a life spent in reading, writing, and thinking: 

And I plead on be­half of scholarship, not that it will save the world, although this has conceivably happened in the past and may happen again; not that it brings material re­wards to the scholar, although this also may have occurred, to the scandal of his academic superiors; not that it is an in­variably exciting activity, for it gener­ally involves a great deal of drudgery … All that I plead on behalf of scholarship, at least upon this occasion, is that, once the taste for it has been aroused, it gives a sense of largeness even to one\’s small quests, and a sense of fullness even to the small answers to problems large or small which it yields, a sense which can never in any other way be attained, for which no other source of human gratification can, to the addict, be a satisfying substitute, which gains instead of loses in quality and quantity and in pleasure-yielding capac­ity by being shared with others ….

Pride in one·s special subject is a virtue, not a vice. It is right and proper, and good to look upon, to see a tanner in love with leather and a carpenter in love with wood. But what a meager portion of the realm of the mind is covered even by the proudest single subject! If only there is the will, how much of the rich realm of the human mind lies open for invasion, for the physicist beyond, be­side, and behind nuclear fission, and for the economist in regions where the circulating medium is of more precious metal than even under the gold stand­ard!