National Library of Australia, Canberra
As far as journalism is concerned, economics is the great contradiction. On the one hand, there’s no subject more like to get you a guernsey on the front page. On the other, there’s no subject more likely to confuse, irritate or simply bore the reader rigid.
If economics is the study of the ordinary business of life, and GNP is what ensues when 86 million Americans get up and go to work, it has the potential to be a subject of great interest to most people. The trouble is that economics turns out to be a highly conceptual, abstract, analytical subject, which is what gives it so much potential for incomprehension.
If Treasury cares about economic outcomes - not just going through the proper process - it also needs to care about communicating its messages effectively to its ‘stakeholders’ - the minister, the minister’s staff, other cabinet ministers, journalists, the financial markets and business people, and the public. The voting public is the ultimate stakeholder in any democracy - as your political masters are well aware - but, though your speeches and publications go up on your website for any punter to see, the vast majority of your communication with the public will reach the public only through intermediaries - at one level, your minister and the government; at another level, the media. As a journalist I think of myself as a retailer of economic information, and Treasury, the Reserve and other official sources as wholesalers of that information. My job is to take what the wholesaler supplies, break it down into palatable portions - often, translate it into simple English - and repackage it for sale to our readers. But the less translation required, the more retailers will want to sell your message, the bigger the audience will be and the lower the risk of mistranslation. In other words, leaving it to others to do the hard yakka of communication isn’t the best strategy.
Treasury offers advice to its political masters, but it needs to be sure the nature of that advice is clearly understood, and also the reasons why one course of action is considered superior to another. It may well be the minister’s staff are the people who need to be convinced before the minister is. But once he or she is on board, they’ll need to convince their cabinet colleagues to agree, after which the minister, prime minister and the whole government will need to convince the public that this is the right policy for Australia. Since we’re dealing with a long chain of convincing, my advice is to begin the convincing job right from the start. A big part of making a sale is actually convincing the person at each link in the chain that it will be possible to convince the next person. The eye of each person in the chain will be on the final link in the chain of convincing: will we be able to convince the punters this is the right way to go? In other words, although you might use additional arguments with the treasurer, the way you explain the basic arguments - the level of complexity - should be much the same as the treasurer will be using to ‘sell’ the policy to the public.
Let me mention just a few of the fundamentals of effective communication. Step one is to think hard about your intended audience: who are they, how interested are they in your topic, how much do they already know about the economics of the topic and, putting yourself in the audience’s shoes, what’s their likely perspective on the policy, their starting-point, biases and preconceptions?
On your audience’s correct level of assumed knowledge, I can tell you now: lower than any economist is likely to imagine. My advice is to use a similar assumption to the one I use: an intelligent, educated audience that knows a lot about some subject, but not economics. You have to avoid trying to impress people with enormity of your own knowledge by using economic jargon and big words generally, and avoid what the psychologists call ‘the curse of knowledge’ - assuming that if you know about it, everyone else does too. And avoid worrying about offending people’s intelligence. This is one of the big reasons why people find economists so hard to understand. Why so? Because the way you construct an argument is to proceed from what’s known and agreed to what’s unknown and contentious. When economists avoid stating the obvious they’re often avoiding stating the premise of their argument; then they wonder why people can’t follow their argument. The other thing economists don’t understand is that people like being told what they already know because they find it reinforcing. You can always excuse a statement of the obvious by saying ‘of course’, or ‘as we know’.
Writing that communicates well needs to be a clear and simple. You do this by avoiding excessive formality - in my writing I try to mimic conversation; by finding the line between simple and simplistic; by writing in the active voice (subject, verb, object; A did B) rather than the passive voice beloved of bureaucrats (object, verb, subject; B was done by A); and by always preferring a short word to a long one, using a mixture of sentence lengths with a lot of short ones, and avoiding professional shorthand.
Economists speak to each other in shorthand because they all know a lot about the topic and leaving out a word or two saves time. As well, economists aren’t averse to the academics’ vice of trying to sound profound by deliberately making what they say hard to understand. But leaving out words can be a great barrier to understanding by the uninitiated. Refer to the ‘money supply’, for instance, and some people aren’t sure what you mean. But adding just one, two-letter word can produce a flash of comprehension: the ‘supply of money’. Not impressed? Try this one: ‘lower output growth volatility’ is more readily comprehended if turned into ‘lower volatility in the growth of output’.
