The communication gap
Experts are easily ignored when they can’t use plain language, writes Shamubeel Eaqub.
Economists (particularly academics) need to reassert their presence in society as citizens.
Experts are increasingly side-lined. Political leaders openly ridicule them and the public emphatically ignore their advice when voting.
Experts are still experts. But they need to find a way to engage in civic life, not just with each other.
Experts’ increasing irrelevance has much to do with their tendency towards insularism. Their awful communication – they talk to each other in anachronistic and technical language – excludes a large majority of society.
Their theoretical models exclude obviously real-life things like politics.
My perspective is mainly about economists, but there are parallels for other disciplines too.
Economists are increasingly side-lined. Our prime minister ridiculed the Treasury’s ability to forecast what will happen next week, let alone in 30 years’ time.
This followed the release of long-term projections to understand what would happen if we didn’t change our policy settings. An ageing population would bankrupt us because of rising costs of healthcare, superannuation and falling revenues from fewer young workers. Unless we change policies now and get on top of the situation now.
As a servant of government, the Treasury could not effectively negate the criticism. As a servant, government economists are less ineffective in their ability to openly argue their case and the many uncertainties inevitably involved in something as complex as thinking about long-term scenarios.
In the UK, expert consensus was that Brexit would be bad for the economy. They signed open letters and argued their case in media. Well-known experts like Bank of England governor Mark Carney warned of the costs of Brexit.
Less of a servant of government, rather more of a prince – but even he could not convince the voters.
Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), the Queen asked a gaggle of expert academic economists why they had failed to foresee and diffuse it.
Of course, many academics had warned of the risks leading up to the GFC and had written extensively about it.
But economics is an art, not a precise science. They could not know exactly how and when the crisis would unfold. They did not incorporate enough of the complexity of financial markets, debt or politics – so their models and writings seemed detached from reality. They often focused on very specific issues that could only interest other experts.
Worse, a lot of their writing was in expensive journals, accessed and read mainly by other experts. Academics’ performance is often linked to their volume of publications in expert journals – it’s a self-reinforcing isolation cycle. The writing is often in highly technical language, designed to exclude non-experts.
Except for a handful, most academics are invisible in public life.
The absence of academic economists in public life has been filled by bank economists. Their brand of simplistic and high-noise commentary on the to-ing and froing of the economy, is the public understanding of economists – rather than the more complex social and political aspects that relate to economics.
This is also true for central banks. Their economics are highly visible, but have a very narrow focus on economic trends. They do not focus on social and political issues, or incorporate them in their highly mathematical, but crude approximations of the real world. Their communication and narratives often speak in code, needing a bevy of experts to interpret what they really mean. They are technocrats who are meant to govern from above with their expertise.
Writing in 1931, Keynes thought about growth, unemployment and inequality, not only for their own sake, but because he feared poor economic conditions would spill over to social tensions leading to the rise of fascism and communism.
We have to understand that the role of the economist and expert is as a citizen and advocate for our society. Not simply as hired guns to advise political leaders or as technocratic rulers.
To regain relevance, economists need to better understand the complexities of the real world. They need to revert to their true form as social scientists, and incorporate, even if imperfectly, social and political interactions. Critically, economists (particularly academics) need to reassert their presence in society as citizens. They should openly engage in debate with other economists, but not exclude the subject of their debate: society. We have to engage with society more and better.