I have had two contrasting experiences. First, I had a student come to office hours saying it was hard to figure which of all the cacophony of economy ideas put forward in the news to take seriously. I pointed out that unlike climate science, where good journalists usually feel that for a quotation meant to be taken seriously (as plausibly true) they need to quote people who are PhD’s in appropriate disciplines and are also usually professors or government employees, they will quote as plausibly true the economic opinion of a much wider set of people, including at least business people and politicians in addition to PhD economists. The picture one gets from the news about the economy and economic policy is much different if one focuses primarily on what the PhD economists are saying.

On Twitter as well, I notice the large number of people who are not pedigreed members of the economics guild who are happy to disagree vigorously with me and with other economics professors there. So my experience has not been one of the economics guild having a monopoly on public discourse about economics.

The second experience was reading Cameron Murray’s blog post about the book Econocracy. Here is Cameron’s summary of the books main points: