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The different priorities of academics and policy writers

- September 9, 2011

I was reading Jay Livingston’s blog today and noticed a delightful slam on know-it-all economist Gary Becker. After linking to it here, I emailed Livingston to ask if many people clicked through to read his article. Jay replied yes, and also it was linked to by Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias.

The funny thing is, my discussion is all meta, about how foolish the Wall Street Journal is to get columnists who are experts in subject A to bloviate on topic B (in this case, A = theoretical microeconomics and B = applied macroeconomics), whereas Yglesias has a substantive discussion of the role of uncertainty in political decision making.

I’m talking all about journalism; Yglesias is talking about political science. Which is pretty funny considering that I’m the political scientist and he’s the journalist.

To be fair (to myself), not all my blogging is about trivialities. I often get around to blogging about actual political science. But I find it interesting that my first inclination was to write about sociology—about the roles and perceptions of experts—while Yglesias ignored the messenger (Becker) and got straight to the point.