Source: Preillumination SeTh, Unsplash
Before my wife and I got married, we went for a few dance lessons in hopes of learning a dance well enough not to embarrass ourselves at the wedding. Our instructor misunderstood or ignored our requests and rushed us through the waltz, the foxtrot, the cha cha and others (yes, I know I’m dating myself), apparently in the hope that we would come back for more lessons, which we never did. Having learned nothing, we took to the floor and did what I might call the Loving Shuffle as the local Vermont band played “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?”
I told this story to Scott Wolla for his podcast at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Scott had invited me and the wonderful Stacey Vanek Smith to speak last fall at his annual conference for economic educators. The podcast episode with me finally came out today. Here’s a link.
If all you want to do is cackle over my dance class humiliation, then by all means go straight to 12:25 and take a listen. But there’s a lot more in the episode than that, so please listen to the whole thing. Scott is the assistant vice president for economic education at the St. Louis Fed, which is the regional Fed bank that specializes in education and data dissemination for the whole system, so he is kind of a big cheese in the field. We spent most of our time talking about how journalists convey economic concepts, and how economic educators could pick up some tips from us.
(A plug here for Federal Reserve Education, a free platform for econ teachers and professors that Wolla and others at the St. Louis Fed helped put together.)
The moral of my dance class story is that it’s better to teach one thing well than many things poorly. As I say in the podcast, I learned that lesson from the economist Michael Mandel, who was my boss at BusinessWeek. He used to tell me, “one idea.” If you can get across one idea in an article, you have succeeded. Make that your goal.
I spent a bunch of time on Scott’s podcast, as authors are wont to do, plugging my forthcoming book, “Economics Without Numbers,” which will be published by W.W. Norton in April. Please click here if you want to be notified when it’s available for pre-publication order, probably around October.
I’ll have a lot more to say about “Economics Without Numbers” in the coming year. It’s been a labor of love. For now, I’ll just say that it’s an illustrated compendium of nearly 500 metaphors dealing with economics, finance and personal finance, from familiar ones such as the invisible hand to unfamiliar ones such as toenail fungus cream.
My goal with “Economics Without Numbers” is to use metaphors as a bridge from familiar things to unfamiliar ones — that is, to provide the intuition that makes economic concepts suddenly make sense. It’s meant to be browsed, not read cover to cover. I hope it will be read by students as well as by the kind of inquisitive people who pick up books such as “Freakonomics,” “The Undercover Economist” and “In This Economy?”
Scott asked me what economic educators can learn from journalists. Well, I said, we journalists don’t have any power over our readers. We can’t flunk them if they ignore us. So Stacey and I and Greg Ip and Brendan Greeley and Kyla Scanlon and a hundred other writers I could name must use our wiles to entice readers to start reading us, and not to stop until we get that one idea across to them. That’s why I put metaphors to work.
(If you’re still reading in hopes that I’ll say something else embarrassing about those dance lessons, sorry, done with that topic.)
Most people will happily admit that they know nothing about brain surgery and rocket science. They’re happy to leave those things to the experts. But economics? That they know. Or think they know. Getting wrong ideas out of people’s heads is just as important as getting new ones in.
A lot of people believe inflation is high prices. No, inflation is rising prices. If prices shoot up and then hit a plateau for a year, yearly inflation is zero. Or this: A lot of people think that countries that have trade surpluses with the United States are ripping Americans off. (One of those people is Donald Trump.) Wrong again. It’s normal to have trade deficits with some countries and surpluses with others. The economist Robert Solow quipped, “I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn't buy a darned thing from me.”
I need to wrap up before I break my own rule about making one point. Metaphors, such as Solow’s barber joke, are ways to make that one point convincingly. That’s what I tried to convey in my podcast with Scott Wolla, and it’s the big idea behind “Economics Without Numbers.”
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