Indeed, persuasion is a skill – the issue is that it is a different skill to wisdom, and those that can persuade often convince themselves that they are the same 😛

LOLOLOL, true.

Definitely. If we want our ideas to be widely accepted then they need to be explained to non-economists who will be unimpressed by your sexy, new, agent-based macro model. Appealing to Keynes is more convincing to the average PPE grad than appealing to Gali!

Of course you’re right that economists regularly appeal to authority in their technical work, too, but their phrasing is rarely ‘erudite’ 😉

Technical skills and appeals to authority share some elements – technical proficiency can be used to appeal to authority, as we often see in economics.

If we want to actually have someone accept our description, then thinking about persuasion is important, indeed. When it comes to learning the skills to create a description, the question is a bit different right.

Do you think technical skills or erudite appeals to authority are more convincing? In what sphere of life?

I remember when I was studying and I felt the same way, so I ended up reading up on a whole bunch of economic history online.

This is the kicker though – time we spend understanding these ideas is also time we could spend learning technical skills that allow us to measure and express things. Think of it like a Cobb-Douglas production function – studying one increases the marginal product of the other, but given a budget the two inputs act as substitutes. Picking the right “mix” is tough.

In this environment the solution seems to be group work – we can each specialise to some degree, and learn enough general theory and history to work together. However, whether current economic education supports that, and how we coordinate, are pretty tough questions.

I’m happy to say that’s something the Auckland Uni Economics Group is doing its best to remedy. 🙂

This quote alone explains why my economics degree has been such a chore. There is hardly any discussion of how the *current* idea got to become the *current* idea. Throwaway comments about “Fresh water vs Salt water macro” simply isn’t deep enough.