Garett Jones on Macro and Twitter

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2010

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

Garett Jones of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the art of communicating economics via puzzles and short provocative insights. They discuss Jones's Twitter strategy of posting quotes and short puzzles to provoke thinking. Jones, drawing on his experience as a Senate staffer, discusses the interaction between politics and economics in the area of tax cuts and earmarks. For example, are earmarks good or bad? Jones gives an unconventional analysis. He also discusses the economics of the new workplace and why that might mean a different path for productivity over the business cycle than in the past.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is February 16, 2010, and my guest is Garrett Jones of George Mason
0:44.2	University. Garrett, welcome to Econ Talk. Thanks for having me. So, Garrett, what we're going to
0:49.5	talk about today, and those you out there in the listening audience, I want to introduce you to
0:55.0	Garrett and his background, which is quite interesting, a little bit of his research, but then we're
1:00.4	going to turn to his efforts on Twitter and economic education. So, this is, although Garrett's
1:08.5	own macroeconomist, Twitter is micro macroeconomics. You're limited to 140 characters, and Garrett
1:16.6	has set himself the challenge of tweeting on some pretty deep issues, many of which draw on his
1:23.4	background, which is why we're going to talk about that for a little bit, and using those tweets as a
1:28.8	form of both entertainment and economic education. So, to get us started, Garrett, tell us about your
1:37.0	career path and how you got to George Mason. It's a little bit unusual. Sure. Well, I got my undergraduate
1:44.0	degree in history at Brigham Young University. I'm minded in sociology. I thought those were good
1:48.6	ways to learn about how societies work, but in both history and social, I noticed that the most
1:54.6	interesting explanations of why the world is the way it is came from economic ideas. So, we read some
2:01.5	of a Fogel's work on the economics of slavery. I read a lot of Rodney Stark's work on the economics
2:06.3	of religion and sociology, and together that just got me thinking, wow, every time people in social
2:11.0	science are raising puzzles, more than half the time the best explanations are coming out of econ.
2:16.1	George Stegler said, there's only one social science and we are its practitioners. I've gotten a
2:21.3	little bit more open-minded as I've gotten older, but it does have a lot to say about social science.
	...

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