Paper to an AUT conference for Secondary School Economics Teachers, 24 November, 2006. (Revised)
Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
I dedicate this lecture to Jack Shallcrass. Some 45 years ago he gave a lecture at Curious Cove on ‘The Right to Dissent’ which has stayed with me over all the years, except perhaps it should be ‘The Duty to Dissent’. In 1977 he proposed to “Listener” editor Tony Reid that they take me on as the economic columnist.
Almost exactly 29 years ago my first economics column appeared in The New Zealand Listener. Since then I have written almost 800 fortnightly columns (and articles and reviews) for it. Over half of them are on my website including all the contributions since late 1994, and a smattering before. My first 76 columns from late 1977 to early 1981, are published in Economics for New Zealand Social Democrats.
The half a million words represent, so I am told, an extraordinary resource, for various purposes, one of which is for teaching. Today’s presentation is to give you a bit more background so you can make better use of them. I am going to give a brief sketch of myself, and The Listener in the context of the media, a description of the logistics of writing a column, and then how I choose the topics and where I come from.
The Columnist
All columns have a persona which comes from their columnist. I try to keep my persona at a low key. Unlike this presentation, columns eschew the ‘I’. Here are some facts you may find helpful.
I have been working as an economist for over 40 years. I am an independent scholar. I have not held a tenured university position for a quarter of a century, although I have held various visiting positions in New Zealand and overseas universities – including currently as an adjunct professor at this Auckland University of Technology. For five years in the early 1980s I directed the N.Z. Institute of Economic Research.
Although people think of me as an economist, I am also a social statistician. There is a strong empirical bent in my research, so I can devote a column to statistical concerns where they impinge on economics. More generally, I am a social scientist, enormously influenced by the philosophy of Karl Popper. I have published in most social science disciplines, although usually from an economics or quantitative perspective.
I am also a public policy analyst having worked on a wide range of public policy topics, and written at least four policy books. Acutely sensitive to David Hume’s distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, I focus on the analysis of the policy process and the underlying theory in a policy debate rather than to promote a policy agenda. This, as I shall explain, importantly shapes the columns.
My main sources of income have been consultancies and research grants. I have just finished a three year Marsden Fellowship writing a book The Globalisation of Nations to be published next year. I am now on a Claude McCarthy Fellowship, starting a new economic history of New Zealand. My consultancy and research has covered an extraordinarily broad range of economics – from macroeconomic forecasting to Treaty claims – which will be evident in the wide range of topics which the columns cover.
Journalism, such as writing the columns, makes up a very small proportion of my income. Perhaps the columns are ‘loss leaders’. Nevertheless I accept the discipline journalism imposes. Perhaps I am really an essayist in the eighteenth century tradition of journalism. I certainly honour the essay as a literary form. I have an Orwellian preference for a simple style, which is probably most influenced by the London Economist, although my politics is not. (My retirement dream is to write elegant essays on insubstantial subjects.)
I read as extensively as my writing allows. Mainly non-fiction: biography, history, mathematics, philosophy, politics and science, as well as in my professional interests of the social sciences – perhaps half a dozen novels in a good year. Probably the main subject category is ‘miscellaneous’.
Most of this, I suspect, you could infer from my columns.
You may get a glimmer of some other aspects of me, although the purpose of the columns is not to show me off. My most recent column on orchestras and Shostakovich, is really about the funding and governance of all the arts in a modern society, but I used my interest in music to involve the reader.
The Periodical.
The New Zealand Listener is New Zealand’s largest circulation serious weekly. I think of its audience as more literate, more curious about the world, more internationalist than the public at large, with a heterodoxy of interests. I’d like to believe they read to inform their view of the world, rather than to get confirmation of their beliefs. However, I dont think those beliefs are very different from those of an ordinary New Zealander, involving a judicious balance of self and family interest with community values. I would like to think they are more tolerant of diversity than I judge the average New Zealander, although I find such intolerance more in the abstract, for they can be generous towards difference at the personal level.
In the three decades over which I have been closely associated with it, The Listener has undergone numerous changes. That partly reflects each editor putting her or his stamp on the magazine. It also reflects its changing audience. The magazine is like many other institutions which I have valued, in that its audience is literally dying, and has to keep renewing itself. As it seeks out each younger generation it has to meet their interests which differ from their parents, not to mention the challenge of new media outlets – the most recent being the blog – and the impact of technological change.
So yes, The Listener is not the magazine I first knew, but then nostalgia is not what it use to be either. However I would like The Listener to be still thought of as one of the most authoritative media sources in New Zealand. I hope my column contributes to that authority, while maintaining a little eccentricity in the way any good journalism should.
The Economics Debate
Economics is not as central as it was during the 1970s. Any economic debates are now largely confined to the business pages of newspapers. The bias towards business probably turns the public off.
In part the change reflects the changing personality of our political leaders. Michael Cullen is no Rob Muldoon who, overly comfortable with economics, maintained it at the top of his policy agenda. They broke the mould after they made Muldoon – some would say ‘fortunately’.
Second, compared to the 1970s the public no longer trusts the economics profession. Some economists promised miracles in the 1980s while very few pointed out the analysis was deeply flawed. The miracles did not happen. The public, which at best gave the Rogernomes grudging support, feels betrayed, especially as some of the false prophets continue as if their promises have been fulfilled. When did you hear them admit that from the late 1980s we had falling per capita output in six successive years – the longest recession on record? Since the distributional policies of the times favoured the rich, eighty percent of the public experienced falling real incomes during the long Rogernomics recession. Advocates focusing on how their friends benefited from their policies, alienate the majority of the population.
Also important for those of us who teach economics, is that economic analysis seems to have become more complicated. For many the challenge has been resolved by substituting ideology for analysis. Take the tax debate. Economists who argue for substantial tax cuts almost invariably argue for compensating public expenditure cuts. They are advocating a change in the balance between public and private provision. That balance is largely an ideological one, although in practice too many economists fudge that issue. By the time a journalist or politician pronounces on tax, as is their want, all subtleties are ignored and they advocate tax cuts uncompensated by spending cuts, probably justified by reference to the government surplus. They have no understanding that OBERAC (the operating balance of government excluding revaluations and accounting policy changes) is not the true measure of the government’s fiscal position, especially for tax policy – I doubt most of them could tell what the letters stand for, let alone what it means. ( One account is on my website.) Ideology eschews analysis.
To make the public even less interested, the dominant ideology of the public debate does not seem to be that of the public’s. Admittedly there would appear to be a greater public dispersion of ideology than there was in the 1970s, despite the decline of social credit and communism. But economists appear to cluster in ideological areas some distance from the core of the public’s concerns, turning them off.
The Logistics of the Column
Logistics have done much to shape the column. You might contrast the opinion columns in weekend newspapers, which are probably filed on the previous Friday, and often seem written the previous day on ‘The Crisis of the Week’ which may be why so many columnists deal with the same topic on the same weekend. That is a cycle for write to read of around four days.
My cycle is much longer. There will be an economics column on privatisation out in the next Listener which some of you will receive in the post tomorrow, Saturday 25 November, and which is dated 2 December. Most people will get their issue in the week between. I filed the column Friday 10 November (although I could have filed it almost a week later), and wrote the first draft on the previous Sunday. Mine is a four week cycle, not a four day cycle.
That means I cannot cover the crisis of the week. Of course I look forward to events: I knew long ago of the new coinage to be introduced in August, and planned the column on the change many months in advance. Even that is a bit misleading. The original idea for the column came up in 2000, when a book I was reading suggested currency seigniorage (the profits to an issuer of currency) might be a good topic. I waited six years for the opportunity to write it up.
So my column topics are rarely dreamed up over night, but are developed – fermented – over a long period. Despite being in a periodical which is likely to be discarded after a fortnight, the columns often have a permanence, and remain useful for teaching purposes many years later.
Because columns are so long in the gestation, I always have a number on the boil – or simmering – ranging from the germ of an idea waiting for the right soil, to almost completed ones. Even so, I am always surprised by how they turn out on paper.
The longer production cycle gives my columns the privilege of an illustration, unlike most weekend opinion columns. From the beginning I was asked to suggest a column illustration. I still am. This means I have to have a mental visual image when I write a column. If, as occasionally happens, I have no image, the column writing is quite a struggle.
Sometimes an image suggests a column. A public health physician once told of a Danish children’s hospital which was going to have to double the size of its burns ward until they realised that the chief source of the burns was children pulling coffee percolators over themselves. A public education campaign put guards around the percolators saving the cost of the ward and burnt children. I immediately saw the image of a child and percolator which headed a column on the priority of prevention over treatment with the parallel in the text of fences at the top of the cliff and ambulances below.
The picture requirement has forced me to move from the abstract to the concrete. Visual images are probably natural for me – the recent NZSO-Shostakovich column suggests even for music. I often read economic papers (or indeed ones from other disciplines) with turgid prose and inelegant mathematics, wondering what the writer was – or was not – thinking. They were certainly not connecting to their audience.
The lack of a good image can limit me. I am a natural mathematician, and can drill deeply below the mechanical algebra to an intuition of what is going on. But sometimes I cannot transfer the idea to something my readers can grasp in the space available. The implications of the central economic model in my Globalisation of Nations are fascinating – if not mind boggling – but the model is sufficiently unfamiliar even to economists, that I have yet to work out how to convey it to the general reader.
Recent developments in behavioural economics are a great idea for a column The traditional notion of rational economic man is widely seen as flawed. Some of the new ideas are both mathematically elegant and make a lot of common sense, humanising economics, even if they subvert some standard policy. I touch on the notion in some of my writings on savings. But the illustration has yet to come to mind. (Curiously, as I write this, one begins to form.)
Incidentally, both examples are of developments in economics which have hardly touched New Zealand economic thinking. The aim of the column is to keep readers abreast of economic developments, but sometimes it gets them ahead. I wrote a column in 1983 on ‘sequencing’ which was a critical issue in the subsequent reforms, and which we got badly wrong. Some years later an academic wrote a learned article on the topic as if they were the first to raise the issue. Of course the column was not cited. Academic economists rarely do, although they are not unwilling to steal any original ideas, and even to precis the text – an acknowledgement of sorts I suppose. Officials on the other hand, sometimes thank me for a column which sheds light on something they have been struggling with.
The Listener production team do not always follow my illustration suggestion: sometimes they do not have what I envisage, sometimes they have a better one. Certainly I am fortunate to have a very handsome looking page.
A further logistical consequence is that given the page size and the illustration, the column is tightly constrained to just over 700 words, bigger than most weekend opinion pieces, but by no means generous. In earlier years a different format allowed as much as 950 words. The cut partly reflects the smaller page and the illustration, but there is a view that modern readers want shorter articles. Sadly, they must want simpler arguments too. Economist Charles Kindleberger’s law states ‘everything is more complicated than most people think.’
Pascal famously said that ‘I shall have to write you a long letter because I have not time to write you a short one.’ Reducing complexity into the 700 words is a major challenge. Some topics I have not written up because I cant see how to pack them into the space. Typically I over-write a column to about 780 words and then trim it back. The exercise tightens my writing, but it can also distort it. For instance, I have a habit of dropping ‘that’ from sentence constructions which, fortunately, subeditors reinsert.
Despite my rewriting the column most days between the Sunday and the next Friday, I am not a good grammarian, and I certainly need a copy editor. (Thankyou Listener subs.) In this time I try to show the column to at least one expert. I tell them I do not want to mislead the reader and ask for corrections, as well as inviting comments. I never say who the experts are, nor what they tell me. Sometimes the column goes to those who could only comment on this basis.
Column Content
The fundamental test of any column topic is whether is that it has some core economic idea. It may not be very apparent to the reader, but it has to be there. Consider the early November column on reforming the tertiary education sectorreforming the tertiary education sector. At its economic heart is the paragraph
“When fickle student demand drives mass education, each institution’s teaching input has to be flexible. But advanced-level education and research need more stability. The two activities require fundamentally different production processes and therefore different kinds of providers with different cultures.”
The simple piece of economics is that the structure of a successful firm and industry is dependent on the nature of the demand for the product and its production process. (I dont think the principle is yet properly understood in the tertiary education sector.)
I interpret economics broadly – the nineteenth century notion of political economy better captures my scope of the subject. (Adam Smith would be empathetic.) But I dont stray outside economics, in the way that Paul Krugman has done recently – mores the pity because he can write superb economics columns.
That requirement of a core economic idea still gives a wide range of possible columns. A further critical requirements has to be that I must be on top of the subject. I have yet to write on global warming: until recently there was no really coherent account of its economics. I’ve also probably under-supplied readers on foreign aid and development in poor countries, for I have never had enough experience there. (I was once in a third world country, and asked to see some of our aid projects, because I thought readers might appreciate a story. It turned out the only thing we were doing was funding an ex-Treasury official to advise them on how to run their budget.)
I like to vary the topic from column to column, with the aim of surprising the reader. However I will come back to an important one a few months later. If I can, I’ll use humour. Often it is sly, very occasionally it is satire. I never try to use irony, the hardest humour to write because readers frequently miss it.
The Guardian editor C.P. Scott famously wrote that ‘opinion is free’. My opinion is just as good as yours, as good as the writer of any weekend opinion piece or blog. Having no comparative advantage in opinion, my aim is to share economic analysis. (Incidentally I am not unaware of Scott’s less well known ‘It is well to be frank; it is even better to be fair’.)
A key requirement is reader interest. That usually means the column has to be topical, although sometimes it can be adapted that way, or in the case of tomorrow’s column on privatisation, the topic just wont go away.
Columns and Policy
Topical columns often touch on policy issues. I am not policy driven and think the New Zealand economics profession has been severely damaged by its emphasis on ideological founded policy conclusions above analysis.
I tell the story of the American ship which arrived in a local port and responded positively to an invitation to a game of football. A day or so before the match the New Zealanders learned that the Yanks had thought it was American football. The hosts, accepting the challenge, got in a coach to explain the rules and how to play the game. After going though these and the various manoeuvres – blocking, wedging, tacking and the like – he announced ‘Let’s have a practice match. Where’s the ball?’ From the back of the room there came ‘Bugger the ball. Let’s get on with the game.’. Too much policy development is about ‘Bugger the analytics, let’s get on with the policy.’
My approach to policy is based on my training as a mathematician, where we were required to prove complicated theorems and then, in order to separate out the top of the class, asked to prove some unfamiliar ‘lemma’ – a consequential theorem – which required a deeper understanding. For me policy is the equivalent of that lemma: something which arises out of a proper understanding of the underlying problem.
That is not to demean the policy process. I have written enough to indicate how much I respect it. Converting policy conception into operation is a challenge. Those outside the policy process underestimate how substantial that task is. That is a why public policy discussion can be very superficial.
Typically a column doesnt come to a definitive policy conclusion. Instead I try to provide a policy framework – a way of thinking about the issue – rather than a conclusive recommendation. I dont take the preacher approach, threatening hell-fire (or poor economic performance) if the general population does not mend its ways and follow my path to righteousness and good policy. Instead I think about how I can help my reader understand some problem better: I am a teacher rather than a preacher.
Because I am trying to teach the reader about an issue, my policy conclusions are not always evident. I recall one column on the major projects of the 1980s – ‘Think Big’ – in which some readers thought I supported them, others concluded I was rejecting the strategy. The aim is to empower readers to reach their own conclusions.
I confess that it is not unusual for a column to be a part of the policy debate, letting the public have insights to issues that are being struggled with in the policy community. I describe an instance towards the end of this paper. That does not hurt the debate, nor the democracy. One historian read my columns to get a sense of what the debate was about – from one perspective anyway.
Oddly, with hindsight I think, I am seen as much more radical than I actually am. I am a very orthodox economist, although closer to the frontier of thinking than some of my colleagues, which may make me seem more progressive and puzzling. But where I am coming from can be usually explained by a good understanding of economic analysis and its application.
(One of my ‘party tricks’ at seminars given by a very ideologically right wing visiting economists is to criticise them from their right. I understand their arguments well enough to do that, much to the bewilderment of the ideologist, and the amusement of the New Zealand audience.)
There are perhaps three reasons why I have the reputation for radicalism. First, as already mentioned, the ideology of the economics of the economic profession does not align well with the general public’s and a teacher, rather than the preacher, works in the context of the public’s ideology.
Second, I criticised Rogernomics because of its analytic faults. Some historian of ideas will one day, report that I got a lot more right than the Rogernomes did. But I was taking on the establishment. Saying the emperor has no clothes does not make one popular in court, especially if he really is naked.
When I have to make welfare judgements, I try to be explicit. The basis of my judgements are very Rawlesian, defining justice as how we treat the most marginal but not ignoring that if we are too generous to them, we may damage their long run interests. I certainly do not think that one should uncritically support the poor or whomever, telling them things which are not true because they believe the rhetoric or because it might be in their short term interests. For whomever you are working, you owe them the best analysis you can provide, even if they do not like it.
Perhaps the third reason for my perceived radicalism is that I am interested in the distributional consequences of economic change and policies. Most economists eschew such interests: indeed standard economic analysis is not well adapted to discuss them. Allow me but one example.
It is almost a matter of faith that free trade increases welfare, although to demonstrate this requires various assumptions which may, or may not, be true. Let’s assume they are. Even then the analysis does not say everyone will necessarily be better off under free trade. That interpretation of the theorem only applies if those made worse off are compensated by those made better off. When did you hear that caveat mentioned by the usual advocates of free trade?
It is easier to say ‘Easton is a wild radical’, than to reevaluate one’s understanding of the model, especially if the grasp is tenuous. Preachers dont like teachers, any more than fundamentalists like those who read the whole bible intelligently. The irony is that I am a vigorous supporter of the open economy, but the case I make for it is far more subtle than the standard trade model, and it acknowledges there are downsides and risks.
I am sometimes asked whether The Listener ever censors me. Only on one occasion has a column been turned down. I had been struck by the transformation of the British landscape, following the introduction of Common Agricultural Policy subsidies after it entered the European Union. The column involved a complex triple pun on ‘rape’ – on the oilseed now called canola; on the traditional divisions of my beloved Sussex; and of the despoiling of the landscape. The column was written with decorum and I am not sure why the prim deputy-editor did not like it. He could not see the ugly yellow blotches of canola fields on a green and pleasant land. In any case, in those days illustrations were in black and white.
Sometimes I am asked to write on a particular topic, perhaps to go with an issue theme. but generally the editorial team leaves the topic decisions to me. Readers sometimes suggest topics, but usually they are not practical or of wider interest. I value these interactions because it is one of the ways of connecting with my readers.
One set of topics where I censor myself, is those which arise directly from my consultancy work. The test is whether I would have to ask the client to clear the column. The restriction is a bit disappointing, because sometimes a job generates some really interesting economics, which would make a super column.
One has to be scrupulous about potential conflicts of interest. You owe it to your reader to let them know where you are coming from. On the occasions I get a travel grant which leads to a column, I mention it, even when the grant was not for journalism, as when a couple of years ago I had the good fortune to be made a Distinguished Visiting Scholar by Fulbright New Zealand. Where there is ambiguity I advise the Listener of the possible conflict and allow them to decide whether it should be mentioned. One is not the best judge of one’s own conflict of interests. I have never been offered a bribe. Pity, as I could have felt virtuous turning it down. (Truth requires me to mention that when I was writing the currency change column, the Reserve Bank gave me the three new coins – they did so to other journalists – so you could say I am up 80 cents after around 800 columns).
It has been the other way around. During the flat tax debate of early 1987, a private sector client felt I was compromising some work I was doing for them by being so publically upfront on this entirely different topic. If pressed, I would have abandoned them rather than the public, even though it would have been to my financial detriment. I am very clear that my duty is to the public, to give them the best economic advice I can. Doing that has probably cost me some contract income and it is not obvious that it has enhanced my prospects in the academy either.
I try not to repeat myself. That means some super topics have not been returned to and new readers may miss out. My greatest regret is Raymond Firth’s book The Economics of the New Zealand Maori – in my view New Zealand’s greatest social science work. I wrote a column on it in 1979. It describes the pre-European Maori economy before the market, and so offers quite different responses to the standard economic questions of ‘what, how, for whom, where and when?’ It would provide a great start to an introductory economics course.
The restriction on not repeating myself is offset by the assumption that key – even common – technical ideas in a column may be new to the reader. Although I assume some economic literacy, even as familiar a notion as GDP is usually introduced in a context of a reference to aggregate output.
My first economic textbook was Paul Samuelson’s Principles of Economics (fourth edition actually). He says when writing it, he resolved that nothing would be taught that had to be unlearned at a more advanced level. It is a challenge I relish too, but sometimes I only meet it by some very subtle caveats. Watch out for them!
The Background to a Column: An Example
The following example is chosen partly because it is covered in a couple of recent columns, but also because I am far enough out of the policy loop to be not disclosing any secrets.
Earlier this year I was flying to Auckland for a meeting. As it happens the flaps of the 737 were not working properly. So we flew over Manukau Harbour for over half an hour, presumably to burn fuel. As it was, we hit the tarmac at greater speed than usual, and ran the full length of the runway, something I have never done before, not even in a 747. The extra flying time meant I was able to finish Global Cities, by Saskia Sassen. I was reading it in preparation for the New York chapter of my globalisation book.
At the meeting on the future of Auckland, we were faced with a consultant’s report, which seemed totally out of touch. And I suddenly realised that the time reading over Manukau Harbour had been very relevant. Auckland may not the New York, London, Paris or Tokyo that Sassen was writing about, but it was New Zealand’s global city. I spluttered this out at the meeting and wrote a note for my colleagues a few days later. (It was about 700 words long: I leave you to work out why I tend to write to this length.)
When I realised that Auckland’s future was becoming a part of the nation’s policy agenda I converted the note into an April Listener column ‘Global First’. I have had much feedback on it – it would be my most widely cited column of the year – and I know it has helped shape thinking. But it is only the most public exposition of a policy debate that has been going on for some time.
Recall the original purpose of the reading was to write a chapter about New York. The economics of global cities is complicated and the column is the barest of introductions. (Its about the economics of place and economies of agglomeration – external economies of scale if you will. Wait for the book.) So I put aside an October column to come back to the economics..
Just before I was to write the column, the Mayors of Auckland announced plans for the future governance of Auckland, plans which seemed to break most of the rules in the policy book. So I abandoned the column on the economic development and wrote one on Auckland’s governance. The Mayors’ plan collapsed a week later, so I rewrote the column, ‘Getting It Together’, maintaining its core analysis of the distinction between federations and confederations. Again I have had good feedback including being told by one involved in the policy process that the distinction was really valuable.
The concern arose from my worrying about the future governance of the world for the globalisation book. I was struck by the difference between the federated United States and the confederated European Union. Auckland is the lemma. (So may be Wellington.) My prediction is that the restructuring of governance of Auckland will be more confederation than federation.
I have yet to write the development of Auckland column. Wait for April 2007 – unless something gets in the way.
Conclusion
A friend proposed the following four questions, which I have already answered at a general level.
1. How does the column attract and hold the reader’s attention?
2. What is the structure of the column?
3. How much and what economics is in the column?
4. How has the column been made palatable and accessible to those intimidated by economics?
A teacher preparing for students might apply these questions on specific columns. But most of all I hope you can use my writings to engage your economic students – to get them to think about economics imaginatively but analytically. I dislike the view that economics is boring and inhuman. It can be exciting, relevant, and interesting, without being just be a matter of opinion and ideology. There are some analytics which are worth mastering and using.
That is why I am an economist. That is what I try to convey in my Listener economics columns.