A question on blogging

I enjoyed reading Miles Kimball’s reflections on 4 years of blogging. I’ve been going only 6 months longer, so we both came to blogging at a similar time. We have a similar number of twitter followers, if that means anything. We read each other out of interest rather than obligation, and not because we agree about everything.

Given all that, I was interested in this paragraph of his:

"Some days I have something I am dying to say. Other days, I think “I need to stay in the game by blogging regularly so that when I do have something I am dying to say, there will be readers there to hear it.” That is, I try to be dependable for my readers so that they will be there when I have an idea I really want to get out there. (According to the rules I have made up for myself, being dependable for my readers includes (a) havingsomething new every day, even if it is just a link, (b) having a Sunday post on either religion or a key text like John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (c ) at least two other posts with some meat to them each week and (d) having the blog be visually appealing with several pictures every week to break up the words. Living up to that has not always been easy.)"

Now I know I generally fail on (d), and I could not do (b). But I’m also very self-indulgent about when I blog. The only rules I have is that I always try to wait at least a day between first writing and then publishing, and that I try and avoid publishing two on the same day, but otherwise I write when I think I have something to say. It was a complete surprise to me that this meant I blogged fairly regularly: when I started I imagined there would be periods of a week or more when I had nothing to write about.

When I did start a number of people said that I should consider joining forces with others, so as to enable regular publication. There are some good examples of that out there, but I felt the premise was wrong. Why should a blog appear regularly? Mine happens to be, except on a few occasions that I’m immersed in something else that takes all my time. But is that any kind of virtue? It is of no interest to me in the blogs that I read, perhaps because I’m invariably reading them with a lag.

So this is my question. Is there any virtue in blogging regularly? I know the legendary Paul Krugman used to forewarn his readers that he might not be writing anything for a few days, but would they really go away if they hadn’t been forewarned? I would be very interested with thoughts via comments or twitter.     

On not being politically partisan

This may seem a little introspective, but there are some general points here about how economists deal with the political implications of what they say.

I guess it is inevitable that as the UK election gets closer more comments on this blog accuse me of being partisan and writing propaganda. Let me start by saying what I think a partisan economist would do, and then contrast that with what I try to do. [1]

Suppose a government does some economic related things well and some things badly. A partisan opponent of the government (in a party political sense) would focus on the bad things, and hardly mention the good things. They would do the opposite for the opposition. I can think of one or two UK academic economists who appear partisan in this sense, on both sides (pro or anti-government), but they are very much the minority. Among the US macroeconomists I know the same is true.

Part of the motivation for writing this blog in the first place was a belief that the UK, along with the US and Eurozone, where making a fundamental mistake in turning to fiscal austerity in 2010. It happens to be the case that this move is associated with the political right, and it is inevitable that I would speculate on the reasons for that. However the IFS has recently reminded us that Labour’s plans for fiscal policy from 2010 were not so very different from what the Coalition actually enacted. If Labour had remained in power and if (a big if) they had stuck to their plans I would be writing much the same critical stuff about the Labour government. (See this post on the European left, for example.) In my NIER piece on the Coalition government’s record, I praise two out of their three major innovations: it’s just unfortunate that their third (fiscal austerity in 2010) is a mistake which dwarfs the other two. 

When I first started the blog at the end of 2011, I always knew I would occasionally stray beyond macroeconomics. I have always had an interest in poverty and inequality, but my first post on that was hardly political - indeed it started off praising the UK Prime Minister. At the end of March 2013 that changed. I wrote “Surely it should now be clear that this is a government with at least as strong an anti-state, anti-poor ideology as Mrs Thatcher, but with rather less honesty about what it is doing.” The first ‘anti-state’ claim came from a realisation by that stage that the drive for austerity was about more than reducing deficits. The second ‘anti-poor’ claim was justified in two following posts: the first documented work by the IFS showing how government policies would lead to a steady increase in poverty, and that and a second talked about how sections of the press went out of their way to denigrate welfare recipients, and how some (not all) politicians went along with this. [2]

Is this partisan propaganda? I certainly think it would be good to reduce both poverty and the incomes of the top 1%: the latter view can come from understanding that recent growth represents a huge market distortion, which economists naturally abhor. I also believe in treating those unfortunate enough to be claiming benefit with respect, so what I write follows naturally from those positions. As the chronology makes clear, I did not choose to write about poverty because it allowed me to be negative about the government, which is what a partisan would do. Another issue I feel very strongly about is climate change, and again I cannot help it if the current government contains many who deny the proposition and acts with - to put it mildly - some ambivalence towards the problem.

So this blog is not partisan. However it is also not ‘balanced’, in the sense of framing everything in ‘shape of the earth views differ’ style, or avoiding saying the obvious because it has political implications, as in this classic BBC headline. If the logic of a position or argument is that one political party has it right and another wrong, why avoid saying this? Nor will I avoid expressing an opinion on voting behaviour: it seems abundantly clear to me that a future Labour government would produce outcomes that are closer to the views expressed in this blog than a future Conservative government, and that those on the left who argue that ‘they are both the same’ are seriously misguided. This is issue based politics, and we need more of it.   

So I do not worry too much about accusations of being partisan or too political, but as ever I'm open to criticism that I'm failing in my objectives. I do worry more about something related, however, but not for the reason you might think. In May 2013 I wrote something I had not imagined I would do when I started the blog, which was a post essentially just about politics. It compared UKIP and the Tea Party, in part because the dominant narrative seemed to be that the rise of UKIP represented the consequences of the Conservatives abandoning right wing views, which apart from certain ‘social’ issues seemed simply wrong and analogous to arguing that the Tea party had arisen because the Republicans had moved to the left! I have subsequently written a few other ‘political’ posts in this sense. In each case I try to write them as any good social scientist should, which is trying to explain political developments, rather than to give an evaluation of whether they are good or bad given my own views. This can be difficult, and you have to choose your language with particular care, as I note in this post. But my main worry when I write these posts is that I will be displaying my ignorance of political science.

So what do you do if you want to read this blog for the macroeconomics, but do not like some of the political implications that I draw? There are hundreds of reasons to vote for a particular political party, and I would hope there are many Conservative voters out there who nevertheless worry that this government’s macroeconomic policy is misguided, and who are also concerned about some other directions of travel. I wrote this post for those Conservative voters, and I want them to keep reading.

[1] Propaganda is information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view. I have never written anything that I know to be biased or misleading.

[2] Here is a more recent IFS assessment of the impact of past policies. At about the same time Margaret Thatcher died, and I wrote this short evaluation of her macroeconomic record, which I do not think anyone can read as partisan.

Advice for potential academic bloggers

I wanted to mark a year of blogging by encouraging other academics (particularly outside the US) to do the same. So lets use my experience to tackle some of the worries that may be holding others back.

1) How do people find out I’m blogging? I’ll be writing to myself!

When I started, I thought my posts would mainly be a useful resource for my students. Things I did not have time to say or elaborate on in lectures. In my case that is all the publicity I gave it, beyond something on my homepage and email signature. But if other bloggers discover that you are writing interesting stuff, it will be picked up. (In my case, I probably have to thank Jonathan Portes, Chris Dillow and - of course - Mark Thoma.) That is one of the great things about this medium.

Now there will almost certainly be a point where you become fixated by audience numbers.[1] But of course it is as much who reads your posts as how many read them. Here I have discovered something that is not that surprising when you think about it, but which should be a great incentive for many academic economists. Economists in policy making institutions read blogs. They do not have time to read many academic papers, but they want something a little deeper than even the FT can provide, and blogs can be ideal from that point of view. So if you have a message you want to get across to those who advise on policy, blogging is the way to do it.

2) I can imagine a few things I could write about, but I’ll quickly run out of things to say.  

Yes, I thought that too.[2] Now I admit macro is a bit special at the moment: events just keep providing material. But even so, you may surprise yourself. You certainly do not have to write as many posts as I do, and they can be shorter. (Who just said they couldn’t agree more!). No one is going to ‘unsubscribe’ you just because you have not posted for a month. How many times have you read a post, or a newspaper article, which you have disagreed with in part because you have better expertise or knowledge? Why keep that to yourself?

3) But I do not fancy getting into online debating contests

This was one issue I had to deal with early on. After writing this, I found myself being drawn into that kind of situation. (I was being provocative, so I’m not complaining.) So I pulled back, as I described here. How much you want to participate in this kind of thing is up to you.

One issue I would be careful about is tone. I once had a colleague who was always politeness personified in face to face conversation, but then could occasionally unleash the most hostile and aggressive emails or memos. I now understand better where this comes from. As I described here, when writing about contentious issues like austerity it is perhaps too easy to be rude.

4) But who am I writing for: other academics, or the public?

That is up to you. I try and make what I write accessible to non-economists, but I know that I often fail, in part because jargon comes so naturally. There are a large number of non-economists out there who are genuinely curious about economic issues, and know that the stuff they get from the conventional media is either simplistic or just wrong. If you do try to write for that audience, but also want to write something more technical, you can flag that at the beginning of the post, as Paul Krugman and others do.

5) But I should be doing research, or reading papers, rather than writing blogs.

The main activity that blogging has displaced for me is watching TV. I write the initial drafts of most of my blogs between 9pm and midnight. Now I try and avoid posting them immediately, because my mental faculties are not great at that time, but instead post them 24 hours later. By that time my unconscious mind has probably spotted most errors. You can also integrate scholarship with writing posts, as I suggest below.

6) But if I stray too far from my area of expertise, I may make mistakes.

Or, in my case, even if you are writing within your area of expertise. But as long as it does not happen too often, I think admitting and correcting mistakes does you no harm.

7) Do I have to put all those links into my blogs?

It would be easy to say at this point its up to you, but I think its good practice to link to others where you can. Bruegel said ‘Europeans can’t blog’, not because there are not European blogs, but because they tend not to link to each other. You will find your readership increases if other blogs link to you, so you should reciprocate.

This requires a little organisation and extra time. I try to keep a note of what I read, which I probably would not do if I was not writing a blog. No system is perfect, of course, and many a time I have come across a note of a post I really should have referenced. But it is worth trying.  

8) But what if my academic colleagues find out I’m blogging?

I may have to explain this for any US readers. In the UK, and perhaps elsewhere, there is a view that for academics to attempt to write for non-academics is a bit vulgar. I like to think this view is old-fashioned, but I’m not sure. However I think this will change. US academics do read blogs, and are not afraid to say so. And in the UK, there is - in ESRC and REF speak - impact!

9) Still, its not going to actually help my academic work, is it?

I’m not so sure about this. Blogging has undoubtedly improved my teaching. I do not mean students just reading my posts. In many areas, writing posts has helped me clarify my ideas, and my lectures are better as a result. I few weeks ago I wrote a refereed article that I would not have been able to write if I had not been blogging, just because writing posts forced me to think about issues more carefully. I have also occasionally found that an article that I have just read contains material that may be of more general interest, and so I have written a post on that (here is an example). As a result, I am more likely to remember what the paper said, and I hope that paper may have got one or two more readers.

10) Any other advantages?

Well, at the end of the year, you can write: thanks for reading the posts, and happy new year!

[1] Blogger says I get around 3,000 pageviews a day, and feedburner says I have around 1,750 subscribers. Is this a lot or a little? Google reader does in principle allow you to compare subscriber numbers across blogs, but it has been saying I have exactly 842 subscribers for about six months, so something tells me this may not be reliable. So,  using myself as an example again, this tells you that you do not have to know much about the technicalities of blogs to be a blogger.

[2] I should have known better. My grandfather on my mother’s side loved spending hours arguing about all kinds of things, my father wrote newspaper articles and books about a wide range of topics, my mother was a sort of journalist for a short while, and my brother is head of a media studies department, so I guess it comes naturally. On the other hand my father-in-law also liked pontificating on political issues at great length, so maybe this just says something about what many men of a certain age like to do.

On not taking sides, and forecast uncertainty

                The last time I can remember Chris Giles of the FT writing about fiscal policy, I came down on him pretty hard. It was the phrase “..the area in which Britain still leads the international debate is fiscal policy” that really got to me then. So before taking up something in his latest piece, let me say two things. First, after my earlier critical post, Chris took the time to send me a lengthy email defending his position. It didn’t change my view, of course, but I did appreciate the effort. It confirmed my belief that Chris is serious about trying to get things right. Second, the article today is more sensible. It basically takes the IMF view I described recently here, which is that we need more monetary expansion, and that if things become worse than expected we should have bond financed fiscal expansion. Not as far as I would want to go, and I would disagree with his arguments for keeping to current fiscal plans, but Jonathan Portes takes on that task here. What I can say is that I approve of his direction of travel, and that he is prepared to make it!

                  What I want to discuss now is a remark Chris makes about economists taking sides. The article starts by chiding the Prime Minister when he claims that low interest rates represent the result of his tough decisions. Chris argues, as Jonathan has said many times, that low rates reflect the poor prospects for UK growth. He goes on: “The prime minister must know that what he is saying is silly, so it suggests he holds the intellectual capabilities of his audience in contempt.” I have recently expressed sentiments along similar lines. He then goes on to examine a recent statement by Labour’s Ed Balls. To quote again: “Blaming changes in deficit forecasts on the pace of austerity alone is not worthy of a serious politician.” If you take the statement Chris quotes as implying that the deficit is higher just because of austerity, then that does indeed make little macroeconomic sense.

                It is what Chris says next that is interesting. “In the current hysterical climate, economists should be wary of taking sides. We know that austerity hurts, but we have little idea how much of the current economic pain is caused by deficit reduction.”  If by taking sides he means trying to argue that everything said by one political party is wrong and everything said by another is right, then this has to be sound advice in an age of macroeconomic spin.

                However, I would also argue that in a hysterical climate, economists really should go public with what they believe to be true, particularly if that belief comes from years of study. If their view reflects what is taught to students up and down the land, then I might go so far as to say that they owe it to their discipline to tell the world what they tell their students.  What in my view makes the austerity announced in 2010 a major policy error was that it attempted to deny this knowledge. We do know with reasonable certainty that fiscal contraction in the form of spending cuts will, ceteris paribus, reduce output by a significant amount. We also know that when interest rates are at their lower bound, what monetary policy can do to counteract this fiscal impact is highly uncertain. Not all macroeconomists will agree with these statements, but I would conjecture that the vast majority do. Given this, it was highly likely that additional austerity would reduce UK output compared to what it otherwise would have been, and if this led to weak or zero growth then it was a huge gamble to hope that monetary policy would put things right again.

                It was in part this belief that macroeconomics had important things to say that current policy seemed to ignore that started me blogging some five months ago. I’ve also found that among the macroeconomic blogs I read there is refreshingly little partisan commentary. OK, maybe that is partly self selection – there is a popular US blog that I do not read for this reason – but only partly. There is a bit more ideology in what I read, but unfortunately that reflects the discipline itself.   

                I also agree with the second sentence from Chris that I quote above in the following sense. Although there has been no growth since the coalition started to influence macroeconomic events, we should never claim that we know that this is all due to their fiscal plans. There are too many unknowns here – in particular, it is hard to know how much future austerity might have influenced current expectations among firms and consumers. I hope that in the past I have simply claimed what I said above, which is that austerity has just made things worse. To say that we know precisely what a policy has done to the economy is almost as bad as saying that we can accurately forecast.[1]

                What all macroeconomists know is that forecasting is a very imprecise game. Study after study has shown that macroeconomic forecasts are little better than guesswork. Forecasts are worth doing, because getting things a bit better than guesswork has benefits that exceed the costs. A corollary of being just better than guesswork is that whether you get forecasts right or wrong is largely down to luck. So to infer, as is frequently done – even in blogs – that because the Bank of England has been consistently overoptimistic about inflation this must reflect some kind of incompetence is simply wrong. Equally, to assert that the OBR were overoptimistic about UK growth because they must have been somehow infected by the government’s beliefs is wrong. Both things are possible but, given what I know in each case, highly unlikely. Given the state of our current, and in all probability, future macroeconomic knowledge, forecasts are generally wrong because the economy is too damn unpredictable. That makes it all the more important that we do not ignore the things we do know.

                  

               

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[1] It is only ‘almost’ as bad because conditional forecasting (if something changes by x, then something else will change by y), involves less uncertainty that unconditional forecasting (something will be y). Note that my statement about fiscal policy is much weaker than a conditional forecast, because it just says that if government spending falls, output will be lower. That is why we can be much more certain about this kind of statement.