I’ve been re-reading Mary Morgan’s excellent book The World in the Model: How Economists Work and Think. It’s relevant to the debate that’s been happening on Twitter – sorry, X – about the way economic research has become ever-narrower and more technical. As Richard Baldwin put it: “We are getting more and more precise answers to less and less important questions.” I’m not even sure that the precision is real. But there is a mania for technique, whether econometric, RCTs, or ‘big data’ methods – and above all for ‘identification’. This means being statistically confident that outcomes can be causally attributed to potential drivers. The identification mania is so intense that I’ve kept a gobsmacking email rejecting an article on the grounds that it ‘wasn’t identified’, when it wasn’t trying to do a causal analysis at all.

The book documents the way ‘models’ have become the dominant way economists work, to the exclusion of other modes of analysis, and argues that this means two kinds of work are excluded: big picture and context-specific detail. The professionally high status work is all “middle level stuff”, wrapped in techniques and modes of thought that prove to incumbents that the work passes appropriate professional hurdles. The dangers are obvious: economics is too silent on big issues, too generic on detail, and extraordinarily conformist.

Morgan concludes: “[D]uring the 20th century, modelling became the way to do economics. The term ‘model’ changed from being a noun to being a verb. ….The epistemic genre of creating and reasoning with models requires a craft skill working with highly formal instruments. … [I]t comes to be thought to be the ‘right way’….” What’s more, economists are taking the requirement for modelling as the way of knowing into other domains such as social policy or everyday phenomena. “Now, when economists look at their small mathematical models they see the real word, and when they look at the big real world they see it as a sequence of their small models.”

The Twitter X thread had a few suggestions – write books rather than journal articles, have one-issue editors for journals more often – but such a strong professional way of knowing and doing is hard to shift. I see some signs of change in academic economics, but don’t know if it will amount to a much broader discipline. Here’s hoping more economists will read this book, or indeed the comments by Nancy Cartwright and Angus Deaton on the limitations of fashionable RCTs.

Somehow, things haven’t slowed down since the end of term but I’ve been anticipating the holidays with some lighter than normal reading. Along with some detective novels, I read Hernan Diaz’ excellent Trust – apparently being made into a Netflix series which will be interesting as it has an Instance of the Fingerpost structure – about the making of gilded age money and what it does to people; and Georgi Gospodinov’s intriguing Time Shelter. They were both supposed to be saved for holiday reading but needs must.

Still, alongside this fare, I also read Making Economics Public: The Hows and Whys of Communicating Markets and Models, edited by two science communication experts, Vicki Macknight and Fabian Medvecky. Their introduction opens with the paradox that economics is very influential – often dominating the news and policy decisions – and yet there is a chasm in understanding and language between professional economists and the public. Concepts familiar and fundamental in economics (such as tax incidence, or the difference between household and government budgets, or why a central bank sees raising interest rates as key to bringing down the rate at which food prices are increasing) are not widely understood. Often not even by the expert journalists supposedly communicating the technicalities to the public.

I’ve long believed this chasm is ultimately an existential risk to economics: nobody gets to retain such influence without public legitimacy. It’s also a concern that some economists see the problem as a need to explain what ‘we’ think more clearly so the slow-of-understanding finally get what ‘we’ mean. As all good science communicators know, communication is a two-way process, done with the ears as well as the mouth. So this slim volume of essays is very welcome.

The book has three sections – why, how, and what are the challenges – and a final essay on economic rhetoric and freedom by Deirdre McCloskey. I needed no persuading on the first of these. The ‘how’ section has some nice chapters, including one on teaching by Chris Colvin (don’t swamp the students with maths) and one on media and communication by Romesh Vaitilingam. There’s a nice chapter by Carlo Martini in the challenges section about teaching students to recognise ‘pseudo-expertise’ of which there is plenty in economic discussions – only look at Twitter any day. (It isn’t always easy.)  All the essays are worthwhile, though, and it’s a slender book. Pricy, per page, though: one to get from the library.