An alternative title for this post could have been 'Economist ennui: how to keep things fresh when you've been talking about the same ideas for the past 20 years'. But that sounded a bit bleak, even for a post on economics.
There's something in the idea though, that there are certain social and cultural issues that appear to be dwarfing economic issues. Or at the very least, there are things happening in society that economic frameworks alone can't help us understand. If I had to pinpoint a day when these ideas started gnawing at me, it would be March 15 2019. Suddenly, a lot of previously important issues seemed small. And the issue of wtf is happening in society that I haven't been paying attention to seemed really, really big.
As it turns out, I'm not the only one feeling a shift in attention.
Let me introduce you to two of my favourite economic commentators: Russ Roberts at the podcast EconTalk and Tyler Cowen at the podcast Conversations with Tyler and blog Marginal Revolution. If you're into interesting economic commentary and haven't yet tuned into these podcasts/Tyler Cowen's blog, you can thank me later for making your life infinitely better. Both economists are excellent at what they do.
Anyway, Roberts and Cowen recently did a podcast on revisiting pandemic predictions, although as is typically the case, the conversation was wide-ranging. The bit on the podcast that made me pause my ironing is as follows (edited down for brevity):
Russ Roberts: ...You know, 10 years ago if you had asked either of us what are the big issues, we would have given a very traditional response. It would have been the same set of issues that I think we would have given 20 years ago: size of government, the role of prices, deregulation versus more regulation, and so on.
I feel we're at a moment in world history now where those concerns seem dwarfed by cultural issues. I've become personally much less interested in, say, whether Modern Monetary Theory is really true. I think it's not. But, I'm less interested in that issue than I would have been 10 years ago. And, I'm much more interested in the cultural consequences of public policy. The impact on human dignity. I'm much less interested in efficiency and growth--the things that I know you've championed. Have you had any of that kind of reconsideration?
...you've been a champion of economic freedom, as I have been, of the importance of growth as I have been. I'm less excited about those issues. I'm more interested in some of the more cultural issues. Has that happened to you at all? And, if not, tell me why I'm making a mistake.Tyler Cowen:...I don't view economic growth as any less important. In fact, the higher our debt is, as we were saying before, the more imperative it is to grow to pay it off. I'm not sure how much more I will write about that, as I feel I've already said a lot of what I have to say about growth.
To me, a key question now is the cultural effects of the internet. It allows people to be much weirder, which is a significant positive, but also pretty often a significant negative. And, in my view it's not polarization: It is weirdness. It's a very different concept. And, we're misunderstanding it.
So, to think through how that's going to work is maybe the question I think about the most right now and that's very much along the lines of what you brought up. And, it was not something I thought about nearly as much 10, 15 years ago.
Note here that neither economist is saying that economic issues don't matter, or that they are any less important than they once were. What I got from that snippet is that there are other things happening in society that everyone, including economists, should be paying attention to and making an effort to understand as well.
And it doesn't have to be one or the other. Where Roberts talks about the cultural consequences of public policy and the impacts on human dignity, economic frameworks can both inform better public policy responses and help understand the likely impacts.
On a purely practical note, it's also worth sympathising with the fact that anyone, including economists, would get bored of talking about the same thing for at least the last 20 years. Understanding new phenomenon keeps both the individual mind, and the wider profession, fresh.
All of this points to the importance of thinking and reading widely. Insights on culture can be found everywhere: autobiographies, anthropology, philosophy, history, psychology (just make sure it survives the replication crisis), podcasts, foreign films and television, social documentaries, even talkback radio.
In the early years of my career, I thought that reading or watching anything that wasn't politics or economics focused was a luxury. That turned out to be a mistake. Knowledge, and more importantly intellectual curiosity, can come from the most unlikely sources. Some of the most gripping social and political insights I've had have been sparked by fictional narratives that moved me into caring about the thing in the first place. On that note, Joe Ascroft has a great piece over at The Blue Review on the conservative underpinnings of Paddington 2, if that's your thing.
Of course, the best economists I know already do read prolifically. In fact, it was the economists who read widely and often outside of their discipline that had the most interesting and insightful things to say early on in the pandemic. All because they didn't treat it as an economics-as-usual event.
I think the new thing I got from this podcast snippet was permission to follow your nose. To let yourself get curious and excited about social and cultural issues. These aren't just interesting side hobbies, these are the things that shape the world we live in. I normally hate the perception that men are drawn to hardcore macroeconomics and women are drawn to touchy feely squishy stuff. However, if that were true (I don't think it is), perhaps in the future it will be female economists who can provide more fresh, insightful and relevant economic commentary.
It's also a relief to feel like I have permission to be bored of endless commentary on how to fix the housing crisis, the effects of minimum wage increases and rent controls, or the best monetary policy theory. It's not that these things don't matter, they still do, and someone needs to talk about them.
But if it feels like you've heard it all before, it's not your imagination.