Kerr on the economics media (updated)

Roger Kerr asks Can The Media Help Promote Economic Literacy? in a column in the Otago Daily Times on Friday 11 January 2008. Kerr points out that

Speaking to the Journalism Education Association in Wellington recently, prime minister Helen Clark said she wished the New Zealand media were better informed about, among other things, economics.

This seems unlikely, the last thing politicians wants to face is an economically literate group of voters. Politicians survive in large measure because voters don't understand the true effects of their economic policies. For example, how many politicians support protectionist policies despite the fact that nearly all economists, from Adam Smith on, have attacked such ideas. Do politicians really want votes realising the true effects of these policies and agreeing with the economists?

Kerr also writes

Probably the resources of media organisations don't allow them to employ specialists of the calibre of The Australian's Alan Wood or the UK Financial Times' Martin Wolf.

Certainly newspapers may be unwilling to pay what is need to attract top economists to move into journalism. The opportunity cost of any economist who moves into journalism in this country would be high. One would think the top economic journalists around the world don't come cheap.

Kerr continues on to say

However, many media organisations do their best to compensate by featuring economic commentary by qualified people through articles and interviews

I'm not sure how true this is. If you look at papers like the New York Times columnists include the likes of Paul Krugman, Tyler Cowen and Alan B. Krueger, the Financial Times includes the likes of Lawrence H. Summers and John Kay. Steven Landsburg is economics columnist at Slate. In the US we have seen regular columns from economists of the standing of Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and Gary Becker in the past. I see no attempt to use academic economics in this way here in New Zealand. Are there any regular columns written by an academic economists in New Zealand?

Of course New Zealand's newspapers may be acting perfectly rationally. It may well be that readers of New Zealand's newspapers simply don't want to read about economics, in which case the lack of any serious economic comment is what we would expect.

Update: I came across the following comment in an article by Richard Baldwin, Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Economic policy and the New Century public discourse.

With all these excellent tools at hand, one might have expected the newspapers and Parliamentary debates to be filled with new insights, new results and new approaches. Alas, with few exceptions, the public debate has not moved much beyond the simplistic pro- vs anti-market exchanges that have dominated Europe since the post-war rise of welfare states. Case in point? The 2007 French Presidential election debate.

In the 1980s, brilliant young economists like Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Jeff Sachs and Joe Stiglitz felt obliged to write Brookings or Economic Policy articles, to sit on government panels, to write policy reports, and to send Op-Ed pieces to the Financial Times. At the time, it was part of the definition of a being a leading scholar. It helped you get tenure at Harvard. It also bridged the gap between cutting-edge research and the public debate on trade policy, exchange rates, current account dynamics, etc.

Today's brilliant young economists are much less interested in participating in the public debate in these ways. I have no empirical evidence to back up this opinion, but I think it is shared by many economists involved in economic policy issues and I had first-hand experience of it during my five years as a Managing Editor of Economic Policy. Young people need publications in good anonymously-reviewed journals; everything else is a luxury.

So the lack of academic involvement in public debate isn't just a New Zealand problem, Europe suffers as well. If this is so, then we have to ask What can be done about it? Do we need direct incentives for academics to become involved in public debate in their areas of expertise? If so, of what form?