Bringing economics to the people
Michael Klein hopes “Econofact” can elevate the public discourse about economics.
President Trump’s recent announcement of steep new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum caught much of the world by surprise, but the reaction was swift. Markets fell, close allies condemned the decision, and despite an avalanche of news to contend with, the prospect of a trade war emerged as the nation’s most pressing issue.
Defending the tariffs on Twitter, the president claimed, “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” By and large, economists disagree.†
Economists are not often celebrated for agreeing with each other. Perhaps more than any other discipline, they are frequently portrayed at odds over fundamental questions. But like most stereotypes, it falls short of telling the whole story. In fact, there are many issues upon which the large majority of economists do agree.
Up until recently, casual observers had few resources to turn to when trying to understand the economics underlying various policy proposals. There are plenty of places to find complex analysis and robust debate, but they’re not very helpful to non-economists.
Enter Econofact.
In this episode, Tufts Professor Michael Klein describes how he’s trying to make economic insight and analysis accessible to anyone with Econofact.org, a non-partisan publication that features easily-digestible briefs on topical economic issues authored by a network of economists around the country.
† Econofact’s breakdown of Trump’s steel tariffs can be found here.
Each week on PolicyCast, Host Matt Cadwallader (@mattcad) explores the ways individuals make democracy work by speaking with the world’s leading experts in public policy, media, and international affairs about their experiences confronting our most pressing public problems.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated and contains errors.
Matt: Where did you first come up with this idea?
Michael Klein: The basis of this idea really goes back to the time that I served in the U.S. Treasury. I was the chief economist in the Office of International Affairs for a year and a half, from 2010 through ’11, and when I arrived there, it wasn’t quite clear what my job should be. I asked my boss what I should do, and he said, “You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.” At that point I doubted both of those statements, but I figured my comparative advantage was doing research, and I thought that the best way to do that there would be to write digestible, non-jargon kinds of notes that would then go to the undersecretary and to the secretary, and sometimes to the President. So these were anywhere from one to three pages long. They were on issues of the day, and they were a way to bring economic analysis to the policy sphere.
When I came back to Fletcher in 2012, it seemed like a good idea to teach students how to do this, to put in place a set of things that they could use when they wanted to transform what they used in econometrics or statistic or in their economics courses to something that would be useful in a policy sphere or in a business or in an NGO. So I started teaching a class like this, and it became very popular.
Then, after the election, I and I know a lot of other economists were dismayed by the level of discourse, and I was wondering what I could do, and my thoughts turned to trying to expand this kind of an exercise by enlisting friends and people I knew from the economics community to do a similar kind of thing. So we started out and launched in January of 2017. At that time we launched with six memos, and we had about 20 economists in our network, and then after we had about a year under our belt, we have published by now over 100 memos and we have about 70 economists in the network. So it’s something that’s caught on, that is getting increasing attention, and I think for the economists it’s very satisfying to be able to take what they’ve spent their entire professional lives developing and learning and studying, and make it accessible to a wider audience. The insights that they have I think can be very valuable and really serve as I wrote some place else, an alternative to alternative facts.
Matt: It’s a fairly common struggle that academics broadly have in translating their ideas to the general public, especially because when it comes to academic research, there’s a tremendous amount of nuance involved and sometimes that can go away when you make a concise breakdown of a particular issue. How have you confronted that problem?
Michael Klein: Well, it’s true that there’s a lot of nuance and a lot of subtleties, but there are also things that are just very broadly true that would get a lot of consensus among economists. As an example, in the ’90s, when NAFTA was first being debated, I was contacted by a radio station and they asked me if I would be willing to talk about NAFTA, and I said yes, and they said “Well, are you for NAFTA or against it?” And I said, “Well, you know, on balance I think it’s a pretty good thing.” And they said, “Oh, we have lots of people who are willing to say that. We’re looking for somebody to say something different.” So I think that reflects this idea of kind of a false balance between one side and another, when in fact you get a lot of people who are experts on one side, and very, very few on the other. So in EconoFact, we don’t have to go into necessarily all the subtleties. There’s a lot of information that’s very valuable that just is shared broadly by economists.
Matt: I think it was Harry Truman who once famously joked that he wanted a one-handed economist, because everything was, “Well, on the one hand, and then on the other hand.”
Michael Klein: Yeah, that’s true, but it still is the case that, for example, most economists, when you look at surveys, most economists think that restrictions on trade of things like washing machines and food end up not being good for a country. Now, there are a lot of subtleties with that. Some people are going to get hurt, some people benefit, but in general, economists are in favor of free trade. So when trade issues arise, there is a lot that’s thrown into the public discussion that economists just think doesn’t pass the smell test. Even if, on the other hand, it’s still the case that there’s a lot of information and a lot of insights that economists have based on our frameworks and also basic statistics that can prove very useful.
Matt: EconoFact actually has a fairly straightforward method to presenting things. You kind of built a structure. How did that develop?
Michael Klein: We thought of that very, very early on. My co-executive editor, Edward Schumacher-Matos, who has a long history in journalism before he came to the Murrow Center at the Fletcher School, said that we want to be non-partisan and his way of putting it is that we flip op-eds on their head. In a typical op-ed, the lead is, “This is what I think,” and then you support it. And he said, “You know, if we want to reach a wide audience, we have to be non-partisan, and we have to say, okay, this is what we know, and then at the end you can say this is what I think, but this is what we know.” So Edward had this good idea of starting out with the issue and then a set of bullet points and then at the end, if the authors want to inject their own views, so this also mirrors the way that I was writing the memos at Treasury and the way I teach students in my class to write memos like that, and again, we don’t want to just preach to the choir. We want to be a resource for people who want to have a serious analysis of these very important public policy issues.
Matt: Did you have a specific type of person in mind? I feel like I somehow fell into this target group even if by accident.
Michael Klein: We’re actually looking at different audiences. My initial idea was to try to target journalists, and then this could be a resource for them, and then the journalists would sort of serve as a megaphone, but then we decided to expand, so we also wanted to go to the general public and also to legislators and their staff, and towards that final goal, we’ve recently partnered with the Scholars Strategy Network, an organization in Cambridge, where they do a very good job of bringing information to legislators from academics and helping legislators make better informed decisions.
Matt: So you have a fairly large network of economists from around the country. I actually believe there are a number here from the Kennedy School.
Michael Klein: Yeah, we have Jeff Frankel, we have David Deming. I’m hoping not to miss other people, but yeah, we’ve had a very good response. I think what’s happened is that like myself, a lot of other economists were frustrated by the level of discourse, and this provides them with a relatively low-cost way to get their research and their ideas and their insights out into the public sphere, so all of the memos that we have are edited by our managing editor Miriam Wasserman and myself, to try to meet our goals of being non-partisan, being free of jargon, being very accessible, and I think the people really appreciate that we take so much time to make what they’re doing available to a wide audience.
Matt: I think it’s the experience of anybody who’s worked in any kind of communications capacity for a university, that working with academics or working with researchers on helping them translate their work can be a long process. How do you cope with that? Do you find that folks have difficulty bringing their ideas into a really easily digestible format?
Michael Klein: Well, we can spend a fair amount of time editing the memos, and as you mentioned, as academics, we’re not really used to writing for the general public, but it’s been interesting where we’ve had people who have written multiple memos for us and of course, the first time they submit something, they might not be that aware of what we’re really aiming for, but then in their third or fourth submission, we really see people doing a much better job of getting towards what we want to achieve, so they kinda get it after a bit and they understand. I think they really appreciate the work that we put into making their memos very accessible and appealing to the widest possible audience.
Matt: So this was an effort that it sounds like it was specifically undertaken as a response to what was happening after the 2016 election. Since then, you’ve been running for about a year, do you think things are continuing to go down the wrong path in terms of the general public’s understanding of economics?
Michael Klein: You know, there’s always gonna be the case where politicians misuse statistics or bring forward arguments to bolster their case that aren’t necessarily that well-founded, so I don’t see EconoFact disappearing as long as we have politics. There’s a lot that we can do. There’s a lot on trade, on immigration, on tax policy, on social safety net, where just sort of the popular perceptions which are fostered many times by political discourse, are just off base, and those of us who spend our professional lives trying to understand these things, it’s satisfying to us to have a venue where we can offer to the public a better informed view of a lot of these issues.
Matt: Can you give me an example of something that has been somehow twisted in the popular consciousness that is fairly easy to set straightforward through one of these types of breakdowns?
Michael Klein: Well, the President in his State of the Union address talked about chain migration, and made a statement along the lines of, “People are bringing in their distant relatives and they’re coming into the country in waves.” This is just incorrect. My wife, who’s an immigration attorney, Susan Cohen, and I, wrote one of our last EconoFact memos on chain migration, and we point out that you in fact are very limited as a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident in who you can bring in, and the waiting times are fantastically long for your sibling. There’s something on the order of a 20-year wait if you’re from the Philippines and want to bring in a sibling, so this is an example where almost a scare tactic I would say was being used in the political discourse, and it’s just incorrect. To have this pointed out, I think, is a really important thing.
There are a lot of other examples too, for example, this administration has also talked a lot about bilateral trade and how evidence of a bilateral trade deficit shows that there’s something like unfair trade practices. Mark Melitz, who’s in the Economics department at Harvard and I wrote a memo about this, and showed that bilateral trade statistics are notoriously misleading. For example, if you think about the import of an iPhone into the United States, the wholesale price is something like $225 that we’re paying to the Chinese exporter. In fact, of that $225, something like five dollars is for Chinese labor and equipment, and the iPhone is constructed from materials and inputs brought in from all over the world, so to record a $225 trade deficit with China for each iPhone being brought in is just completely wrong, and yet this is then the focus of trade policy and so-called unfair trade practices. So there are lots of examples like that, and social safety net issues, other immigration issues, in tax policy, so there are a lot of things, going back to what you talked about earlier, sure there are a lot of subtle points, but there are also a lot of very broad points that are just misunderstood, just because people don’t spend time studying that. Those of us who do, we’d like to make our knowledge known to the public.
Matt: Of course there are a lot of policies based around economic concepts that are still very controversial, things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which of course, was negotiated and then the United States withdrew from it. This was a deal that we saw folks on both the left and the right reject while some accepted it. What happens when you have issues like that where there is legitimate disagreement? Do you try and air both sides, or do you even touch those types of issues?
Michael Klein: So we don’t have a memo specifically about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but arguments for or against it would draw on a wider set of arguments, and we do try to be very even-handed. This is part of the reason we spend so much time editing each memo. We want it to be fair, even-handed, non-partisan, so Miriam Wasserman, the managing editor, does a really good job of saying, “Well, you wrote this, but what about this other argument?” And she’ll ask the author to put in other arguments and to be very even-handed, so we’re not looking at specific policies so much, but when a statement or a policy or something is based upon a claim that’s just clearly off, we try to point that out.
Matt: What other things are you seeing out there in terms of, have you seen other efforts that you have found to be effective at communicating these concepts to the broader public?
Michael Klein: I think one of the challenges that we try to address, and I don’t think is as widely addressed, is that a lot of people on both the left and the right are preaching to the choir, and I don’t see much else out there that is aimed toward the wider public as we are, and is also trying to be as even-handed as we are. You get certain bloggers who are clearly sort of speaking to their audience, and very early on, Edward and I had the idea that we didn’t want to be that way. We wanted to be even-handed. We wanted to be non-partisan. We wanted to put the facts out there and let people come to their own conclusions, but putting the facts out there is itself a really sort of important and sometimes controversial point, because people will say, “Well, I don’t care what I see with my own two eyes, I want you to listen to what I say.” So I think it’s an important service, and I don’t in fact see a lot of other places out there that are trying to be even-handed, and that might be a little unfair. Maybe I’m just ignorant of a lot of these places, and there are a lot of people doing really good work, but there are also a lot of people writing blogs and so on that are clearly taking a stand one way or another in a way that we’re trying to avoid.
Matt: Is this something that can continue to be molded for the shorter formats that it seems society demands now?
Michael Klein: Well, we actually have if you go to the landing page, Econofact.org, you’ll find a short version of each memo, and that gives you the basic headline. Then if you click on the title of the memo or the button that says “Read more,” then you’ll have a longer version, which is anywhere from 800 to 14, 1600 words. As I mentioned, this is the way in a lot of different forums people want to convey information. They’re not writing academic papers and on the other hand, they’re also not doing tweets, so this is like enough information but not too much. I think this is a responsible way to present the amount of information that’s important for these kinds of issues, but not getting bogged down in details, even though not getting bogged down in details doesn’t mean glossing over important subtleties.
Matt: Do you find that some people end up reading the entire thing reliably, while a broader subsection will just kind of go over the brief that shows up on the website?
Michael Klein: It’s a little hard for us to tell, but based upon the click rate that we have from Google Analytics, it seems like we have a better than industry average of people going through and reading the longer memo, but the short versions that Miriam crafts from the longer memo I think do a good job of giving the essential information, and as you say, people sort of want a lot of information in a little bit of time. I think in these short versions, we actually do a good job of that, and the longer versions go into more detail and provide a more full explanation, so if people are reading the long versions, that’s great, but even the short versions I think are giving a lot of information to people.
Matt: I asked before about who you were targeting with this. Have you been surprised at all by the types of people who have ended up finding it?
Michael Klein: You know, we don’t really know so much who finds it. Sometimes we hear secondhand or third hand, but I’ve been very pleased by our reception by journalists, by legislators and their staff. I hear sometimes from the general public, people have mentioned that they’ve read it. It’s a little opaque to me still, like actually who are we reaching. We’ve had something like 300,000 page views from 200,000 unique visitors, so I don’t know who those people are, and I’d like better information about who’s actually reading it, but I think we are getting out there and increasingly so. It sort of is snowballing in a nice way.
Matt: Presuming that you had the resources, what would the future look like for EconoFact?
Michael Klein: Well, first off, we’re planning the bake sale.
Matt: And the car wash next?
Michael Klein: Yeah, the car wash. Yeah, we’re gonna stand out there with signs, you know. I think one answer’s a little bit more of the same. We’d like to get more memos out, and given the amount of time that it takes us to edit them, we could use more resources there. We’d like to employ more students at Fletcher as interns. I think that’s both good for us and a very valuable learning experience for them. We’d like to look at perhaps doing videos or podcasts or things like that, not to compete with you too much, Matt, but just our mission really is to raise the public debate and the public understanding on these kinds of issues, so there’s probably a range of things that we could do to meet our broader mission, and if we have the resources, if people buy enough cupcakes and get their car washed often enough, I think we’ll be able to start thinking about ways in which we can meet our goals other than what we’ve already been doing. What we’re doing is always going to be the core of it, having very good, high quality, accessible memos that speak to important policy issues.
