Communicating economics to audiences beyond the ivory tower has never been more vital for policy and public debate – nor have there been more opportunities to reach those wider readerships. This chapter discusses some initiatives to communicate economics more effectively and potential lessons for economists looking to be more public facing.

Getting research written up in the media or being used to provide expert comment on news stories is a good leading indicator of an economist’s impact on the wider world. A comment once made to me by Julian Le Grand, London School of Economics (LSE) professor and former prime ministerial adviser, is representative of the typical view among UK parliamentarians and senior civil servants:

‘In getting attention in Westminster/Whitehall and having a major policy impact, getting into the press is absolutely central. Press briefings summarising relevant pieces are circulated once a day around No. 10, etc. An article on new research by, for example, Nick Timmins at the Financial Times is worth its weight in gold.’

Yet academic economists in the UK and elsewhere in Europe have often been accused of hiding out in their ivory towers and not engaging with the popular media with the same enthusiasm as their American counterparts – people like economics Nobel laureate cum New York Times columnist Paul Krugman or Steven ‘Freakonomics’ Levitt.

There is some truth in this view, and it partly reflects a lack of resources: getting involved with the media requires organisational commitment and support, which are rarely forthcoming in European universities. It also reflects weak incentives: despite the efforts of research funding agencies to encourage scholars to communicate their findings to wide audiences, the real rewards come from communicating with one’s peers and that means technical articles in top journals.

Happily though, some research institutions have shown that is possible to combine rigorous economic scholarship with being ‘in the news’ – as well as having significant influence on policy and practice. In the UK, for example, staff and associates of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) at LSE are often found on press comment pages, providing expert insight in broadcast news stories or actively promoting their expertise in blogs and on social media.

In contrast with the many economists who seem reluctant to package their findings in a way that will attract an audience beyond academia, IFS and CEP have always sought to buck this trend: one of their central aims is for top-quality economic research to have an impact on society through the long-term percolation of new ideas into policy, practice and public understanding.

Over the past two decades, there has also been a series of cross-institutional and cross-national initiatives in Europe to encourage economists to become more public facing and to support them in that endeavour. The very first was set up in Italy by Tito Boeri in 2002 in response to a national media landscape then dominated by Silvio Berlusconi: La Voce was the original economics policy portal and the inspiration for VoxEU, set up by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR, a global network of research economists) in the summer of 2007 to provide ‘research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists’.

Even before then in the mid-1990s, the Royal Economic Society (RES, the professional association of UK economists) launched a ‘media initiative’, in part as a way to attract more young people to study economics and provide future generations of economic researchers and policy advisers. 

More recently, in response to demand from policy-makers and the public to answers to pressing questions around the pandemic, a group of UK economists launched a project to bridge the gap between academic research, government policy and the general public. As the Economic Observatory website explains:

‘Our goal is to provide balanced and reliable answers to the economic questions that Covid-19 and its aftermath will bring. We make it our mission to make these answers as accessible and engaging as possible. The team is drawn from across the nations and regions of the UK, with a hub in Bristol. By publishing daily articles, videos and charts, we believe the Observatory can help the public and policy-makers better understand the pandemic and the numerous challenges that will follow.’

I was involved in the launches of the RES initiative, the VoxEU policy portal and the Economics Observatory, and the following outlines the thinking behind their establishment, what they have achieved to date and some lessons for economists who would like to be more public facing.

The Royal Economic Society media initiative

The RES media initiative launched in early 1996 with initial financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the UK’s public agency funding research in the social sciences. Its overall aim was to promote the public profile of the Society and the economics profession more broadly via the press, broadcast and online media – to communicate research findings and expertise to people who can make use of them, to enhance the public understanding of economics and to attract young people to study the discipline to provide the next generation of economists in the UK. It was the brainchild of then RES secretary-general Richard Portes (also the founder of CEPR in the early 1980s), together with the late Tony Atkinson and David Hendry, both RES presidents during the 1990s.

At the heart of the RES media strategy was a steady stream of press releases to a database of journalists. These ‘media briefings’ summarised in a punchy and accessible form the findings of research projects, either those published in books, working papers, scholarly journals (like the Society’s own Economic Journal) or special reports prepared for a wider audience or which were presented at academic conferences or public events. They were eventually circulated to a database of nearly 800 journalists and bloggers in the UK, continental Europe and North America, initially by mail and later, as new communications technologies emerged, by email and social media. Tailored versions of the briefings were also sent to targeted groups of journalists – and circulated to all government economists and school teachers of economics and related subjects.

As the RES media consultant from the launch of the initiative through till 2019, I also had a ‘reactive’ role, which partly involved advising individual academics and research institutions how and to whom in the media they might seek to promote their research. It also involved providing journalists with researchers to advise them on particular news stories or features. After the global financial crisis of 2007-09, this stream of enquiries (which used to be at least twice each week) increased substantially – not just from core economic journalists but also from a much wider global community of journalists. From 2013, I also promoted RES output via social media, notably Twitter. 

The RES initiative enjoyed great success: the media response to the economics profession’s efforts to increase coverage of its output was overwhelmingly positive, generating much coverage and indicating that there is a large appetite for economic research delivered in a user-friendly way. At the same time, academic economists welcomed assistance in their dissemination efforts, responding well to the challenge of presenting their work in a form accessible to a wider, non-specialist audience.

Early on in the life of the RES media initiative, I wrote an article summarising the characteristics of economists’ work that attracts the most media attention. This analysis – which Roger Middleton quoted in his 1998 book Charlatans or Saviours? Economists and the British economy from Marshall to Meade – is worth reiterating here:

• The research covers subjects that are high or which frequently recur on the agenda of public conversation. These days, they might include work-life balance, GM foods, school quality and house prices, happiness and immigration.

• The research comes up with distinct and easily quantifiable results.

• The research has clear implications for government economic and social policy.

• The research provides novel perspectives on industries of general public interest, typically those whose products people really enjoy buying, such as restaurants, wine, gambling, films and music.

• The research offers an overarching perspective on great themes of modern concern like the impact of globalisation and new technology.

VoxEU and the Centre for Economic Policy Research

Founded 15 years ago by CEPR, the VoxEU site features daily columns by established and emerging members of the profession, which are accessed by a wide range of readers. The main target audiences in academia, thinktanks, finance ministries and other government departments, central banks, international organisations and the media usually have at least a little economics training. But the idea is to avoid the equations and write in a succinct and readable way, with the key findings and policy implications upfront.

VoxEU was inspired by the success of the Italian language site, La Voce, founded by Tito Boeri. La Voce means ‘the voice’ in Italian, and this is what inspired the Vox name (Vox.org was taken at the time by a Facebook wannabe, so VoxEU.org became the chosen website address). La Voce is a collection of online opinion pieces, which are short and written for the average newspaper reader. Given the large number of English language blogs, Richard Baldwin (founding editor-in-chief and still the driving force behind the initiative) felt that VoxEU should aim more upmarket – that it should become more like a Brookings Papers for the 21st century, thus acting as a bridge between technical, academic economics and the wider universe of people interested in economics.

The first few months of VoxEU were a success of sorts. This was almost guaranteed given the founding contributors: Philippe Aghion, the late Alberto Alesina, Richard Baldwin, Erik Berglöf, Giuseppe Bertola, Tim Besley, Olivier Blanchard, Tito Boeri, Willem Buiter, Michael Burda, Stephen Cecchetti, Daniel Cohen, Mathias Dewatripont, Juan Dolado, Esther Duflo, Barry Eichengreen, Jeffrey Frankel, Francesco Giavazzi, Rachel Griffith, Philip Lane, Philippe Martin, Richard Portes, Anne Sibert, Guido Tabellini, Shang-Jin Wei and Charles Wyplosz.

But as Richard once put it, ‘then we got lucky, as the world got unlucky’. The global financial crisis is what really gave VoxEU a large, loud voice in the world of economic research and policy. While the site was well read before the US subprime crisis, August 2007 was when our readership really took off. In the autumn of 2007, things seemed incomprehensible to most economists, journalists and policy-makers; writers like Stephen Cecchetti rode to the rescue by explaining exactly what was happening. His column on it, ‘Federal Reserve policy actions in August 2007: frequently asked questions (updated)’ set a standard for serious economics applied to the crisis, when most economic journalists and opinion column writers were talking about ‘liquidity problems’.

When Lehman Brothers went down in September 2008 and threatened to take the US and global economies with it, VoxEU again shone. The world, it seemed, had changed in ways that only a few experts understood, and even the experts did not see all the pieces. VoxEU became a vehicle for sharing this knowledge quickly and effectively – without having to write long reports, or trying to dumb down complex ideas, facts and theories into 800-word newspaper opinion pieces.

In late 2008, the crisis turned from a North Atlantic banking crisis into the global crisis via a massive trade shock. VoxEU’s readership reached beyond the North Atlantic along with the crisis. In 2010, the eurozone crisis provided another boost, as did the shock outcome of the Brexit referendum and, most recently, the economic crisis sparked by the pandemic and the economic ramifications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. VoxEU, in short, does well when economies do poorly.

VoxEU matches interesting writers and interested readers. This is beneficial to both. The world’s best economists are driven by a desire to apply their brains, hard work and specialised knowledge in the interests of better informing the policy choices that affect people’s everyday lives. The fact that VoxEU readers include a vast range of government officials, private sector economists, elite business and media professionals, and academics is a strong draw for the world’s best, policy-relevant economists. That pins down the writer side. The reader side comes with the high-quality columns that VoxEU authors write every day.

The Economics Observatory 

The seed of an idea that grew into the Economics Observatory was first planted and nurtured in a series of conversations in March 2020. In the wake of the pandemic, lockdown and what already looked likely to be the deepest recession in living memory, there was a growing sense that the UK’s economic research community should come together to answer questions from policy-makers and the public about the economics of the coronavirus crisis and recovery.

With funding from ESRC and hosting for the pilot stage by IFS, it was possible to mobilise the expertise of economists from a wide range of universities and research institutions. At launch just a couple of months later, on 1 June 2020, 40 Q&A articles were published on the website, a number that has since grown to well over 550 by early 2022.

Many of the topics that were addressed initially were focused on the immediate crisis: what damage would lockdown and recession cause to people’s physical and mental health? How would children and parents cope with school closures? Which firms and industries were being hit hardest? How did the government’s job furlough scheme work? What was being done to protect the most vulnerable? And how might we end up paying for these big public policy interventions?

But the team of lead editors (Tim Besley, Jagjit Chadha, Diane Coyle, Huw Dixon, Rachel Griffith, Michael McMahon, Carol Propper, Graeme Roy, Sarah Smith and John Turner) also wanted to explore some long-term challenges raised by the pandemic, the recession and their aftermath: what will happen to big cities if there is a more permanent move to working from home? How can we make up the learning losses suffered by a generation of children? And which policies might be most effective in tackling the high, and highly unequal, impact of the crisis on businesses, jobs, incomes and mental health.

Many people and organisations have contributed to Observatory’s growth, not least ESRC and the University of Bristol, which is now hosting the hub. But recognition is particularly due to Rachel Griffith (IFS, Manchester and a recent past president of the RES), whose scholarship, dynamism and commitment to communicating economics made such a key contribution to the project’s early development. Rachel is also a pioneer in teaching a course on communicating economics for undergraduate students.

The Economics Observatory aims to bring economics to the public in an accessible way. Similarly, the annual Festival of Economics in Bristol is a longstanding effort to engage with the public on economic issues central to their lives. The festival is co-programmed by Diane Coyle at Cambridge, who founded the event in 2012, and Observatory director Richard Davies at Bristol, the UK’s first professor of the public understanding of economics.

Lessons

For economists wanting to write about their research for readers beyond their narrow specialism, VoxEU is a good starting point. Similar ‘multi-authored blogs’ open to new contributors include Ideas for India, the Economic Research Forum (covering the Middle East and North Africa) and The Long Run (established by the Economic History Society) – as well as several sites in languages other than English, including Nada es Gratis in Spain and Italy’s La Voce.

Similarly, LSE has a suite of blogs – which cover economics, business and politics in a number of regions of the world – written at the level of The Economist or Financial Times, and which are generating a broad global readership. The editors are very open to ideas from researchers looking to try their hand at writing for non-specialist readers.

More advice on communicating economics through blogs, Twitter and so on is on the Communicating Economics website that I launched in 2017 together with Rachel Griffith and Bob Denham of Econ Films. The site includes many examples of the use of film and video as tools for communicating economics, as well as advice on making videos and how to perform well in front of camera whether you’re being interviewed by colleagues or a big broadcast organisation like the BBC. One notable piece explains the five steps involved in making an effective economics research video of under three minutes; another provides an example of how to explain your research in just 15 seconds.

Of course all the principles of effective research communication go back well before the internet became ubiquitous. Whatever the communication channel, the best place to start is to write a short summary of the key findings of your research in a way that’s accessible and appealing to someone who isn’t trained in economics – something that you’d be happy to give to your spouse, your child or a non-economist friend. The notes I’ve long used on how to write a ‘media briefing’ summarising your working paper or conference presentation are on the site.

Communications training for economic researchers

Some members of the Communicating Economics team and the Economics Observatory hub provide training for economists focused on opportunities to communicate their research findings and economic expertise to audiences beyond academia – to have more ‘impact’ on policy-makers, private sector decision-makers and the general public.

It is aimed at early and mid-career professional economists looking to develop their communication skills: translating detailed research and policy analysis into accessible messages for non-specialist audiences; writing clearly and presenting well in public speaking; and making effective use of broadcast media and social media. Courses and workshops, typically a half-day or full day, cover:

• Effective research dissemination: why it matters; the role of the media; engaging with the public and media agendas; making an impact outside academia; media success stories; developing a research programme’s media and communications strategy.

• Thinking strategically about how to package your research findings and research-based policy analysis and commentary, when to release it, which audiences to target (policy-makers, private sector, the media, the general public) and how to respond to ‘real world’ opportunities to intervene in public debates – for example, elections, referendums, European/international summits, economic data releases.

• Stories and press releases: key elements of news; the importance of narratives; using rhetoric and metaphor; positioning research for the media; placing stories; reacting to news, communicating with the press.

• Writing accessible versions of research papers and evidence surveys for different audiences: including VoxEU; and other multi-authored blogs (for example, LSE’s suite of blogs; the Conversation).

• Effective presentation to non-specialist audiences – how to summarise your findings and their significance in 5-10 minute presentations.

• Organising events to present research findings and analysis: public meetings; policy seminars with civil servants, politicians, etc.; working dinners with journalists – also taking advantage of publicity opportunities at academic conferences, such as American Economic Association, the European Economic Association and the RES, and ‘festival of economics’-type events like Bristol’s.

• Establishing an effective Twitter presence: how to condense the message of your research in a way that attracts attention and stimulates productive discussions.

• Developing ideas for short films – for example, those posted on Vox Videos; how to do interviews well; different types of media interviews (TV/radio; live/pre-recorded; studio/down the line); conveying what you want to say rather than responding to someone else’s agenda.

Final word

Economic research institutions like IFS and CEP – as well as the cross-institutional initiatives by the RES, VoxEU and the Economics Observatory – show that it is possible not only to follow the rigorous intellectual pursuit of economics, but also to illuminate the wider worlds of policy-making, private practice and public debate.

Nevertheless, there remains much to be done: there are powerful forces in society whose interests are challenged by scientific experts and which therefore seek to discredit them in the eyes of the public (the Leave campaign in the UK’s Brexit referendum and ‘anti-vaxxers’ in the pandemic are two recent examples). What’s more, surveys of representative samples of the public by ING and the Economics Network show the limitations of what has been achieved in improving the public understanding of economics.

In addition to the efforts described above, a number of other overlapping initiatives are seeking to address particular audiences: 

• Discover Economics is an RES campaign that aims to broaden the appeal of economics to potential university students, change perceptions of economics and economists, and attract more young women and people from minority and state school backgrounds into the field. It is led by Sarah Smith at Bristol and Arun Advani at Warwick.

• CORE (Curriculum Open-access Resources in Economics) is an initiative launched after the global financial crisis reform in response to student pressures for a new introductory economics curriculum and the sense of a need for ‘teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened’. Led by Wendy Carlin at University College London and Samuel Bowles at the Santa Fe Institute, it seeks to change economics education globally to a focus on the most important problems faced by our societies including climate change, injustice, innovation and the future of work; to put the student at the centre of pedagogy using learning materials and experiences attuned both to the social problems that students care about and to how students acquire facility and confidence in using and communicating economics; to make knowledge freely available on a global scale by providing high-quality open access educational resources; and to help change who studies economics to include more women and other underrepresented groups by changing content, pedagogy and access to knowledge.

• The IGM (Initiative on Global Markets) Forum at Chicago Booth has for just over a decade been regularly polling some of the world’s top economic experts in the United States and Europe for their views on topical issues of public policy. Over the past three years, I have been coordinating these regular surveys, which have included questions about the economic implications of the pandemic, climate change and the Ukraine war, as well as more traditional economic concerns with jobs, inflation, competition and taxes.

• #WhatEconomistsReallyDo is an informal initiative to address common and ill-informed misperceptions of what economics is about (often published in The Guardian newspaper). The hashtag was coined by Oriana Bandiera at LSE and formed the title of her 2018 RES annual public lecture for school students. In a piece written with colleagues, she notes:

‘all the bashing of economics can change how policy is made. It gives politicians freedom to make policy choices without being accountable to the facts. We are heading away from evidence-based policy and dangerously close to surrender to special interest groups, gut feelings and superstitions. Now, that is something truly scary’.

As Oriana’s conclusion suggests, communicating economics to audiences beyond the ivory tower has never been more vital for public policy and public debate. What’s more, as I hope this article has shown, never have there been more opportunities to reach those wider readerships. Individual economists like those mentioned here have played key roles in driving greater emphasis on effective communication of economic research analysis and evidence – but more needs to happen collectively within the profession. As demand for economic expertise rises, we need to boost the supply of public facing economists.

Romesh Vaitilingam

June 2022