CAROLINE BAUM, BLOOMBERG COLUMNIST: As a journalist in somewhat good standing, let me offer some thoughts on this subject. I have no idea how anyone can write commentary/editorials without a thorough understanding of the subject matter. Degrees aren't the best barometer of understanding. Most Wall Street economists don't know the difference between a shift in the demand curve and a movement along the curve, which is something a self-trained/street-taught columnist like myself understands cold and thinks is the most basic tenet of all economics.

As to whether the New York Times reinforces its liberal bias with untrained editorial writers, I'm not sure it's as devious as that. Much of media reporting is devoted to government and government policies. Government is their life blood. Therefore, the bigger the better. If government were smaller, they might actually have to go out and find a story instead of cultivating their inside sources, writing exactly what the government wants them to write so they will be graced with a leak on the next big story. That is my theory on the liberal bias in the media, for what it's worth.

JOHN SEATER, NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY: Well, if my original remarks are going to cause such a stir, I suppose I should say a few words more. I was and still am puzzled by the fact that a prominent newspaper such as the New York Times has an editorial board comprising only people with no expertise in the fields they pontificate about. More important, I was and still am puzzled by the fact that anybody takes the editorials of such a newspaper seriously.

I was not talking about reporters, only editorial writers. I think a little formal training or work experience in substantive fields would be a good thing for reporters, too, so they would understand better the answers they receive when they ask questions and so they would know better the right questions to ask in the first place. However, that is another issue. I was talking only about editorialists. Bruce Bartlett characterizes the situation correctly when he distinguishes between reporting and editorializing. The latter is an attempt to analyze, draw policy conclusions, and persuade the reader about a point of view. I think it very unlikely that an editorial writer who lacks both formal training and relevant work experience, as do the Times writers, can analyze economic policies in either positive terms (how the policy works and the effects it will have) or normative terms (whether the policy is socially beneficial).

My question "What is Savitz's problem?" was not a blow-off but rather was instigated by the both the tone and substance of Mr. Savitz's original response. He clearly was angry, and I did not understand why. What was the problem? I now think he misinterpreted my comments as applying to all journalists, which they did not. However, to clarify matters, I am indeed generally suspicious of editorial writers, almost none of whom seem to have any training, either academic or on-the-job, in the fields they write about. I disagree with Mr. Savitz about the need for substantive training and/or experience. Mr. Savitz caricatures my view as saying that a Ph. D. is required to write editorials. That isn't my view. My view is simply that an editorial writer worth reading will have training and/or work experience in the area he writes about. I want my auto mechanic to have been trained in auto mechanics, either in school or on the job. Is it too much to expect my editorial writer to have received similar training in the relevant field? On "technical" issues, such as economics or finance or global warming, the writer definitely does need some training, however acquired. Otherwise, he often -- indeed, usually -- will produce articles that are misinformed, misleading, and plain wrong. (Just think what an untrained auto mechanic would do to your car!) A good editorial writer will understand the issues, will be aware of what the average reader knows and doesn't know, and will interpret events to help the average reader understand them. He cannot do that day after day without substantive training and experience. Exhibit A is the writing of the New York Times editorial board.

Expertise is no guarantee that the writing will be good, of course; see Paul Krugman's popular work of recent years. Professor Krugman is simply dishonest, often misstating the current state of economic knowledge and professional opinion. His writing is so bad I have stopped reading it. Much of what he says is willfully inaccurate, and I consequently learn nothing from it. I am not stimulated in any way, except for becoming irritated by his professional dishonesty. However, the fact that Professor Krugman writes bad editorials about economics does not prove that economics training is unnecessary for writing good editorials about economics, only that it is insufficient.

BRUCE BARTLETT, NATIONAL CENTER FOR POLICY ANALYSIS: It's worth remembering that Paul Krugman is not a member of the Times editorial board. Also, his columns on pure economics are usually not that bad. Where he goes off the handle is when he writes about foreign policy, politics and other issues that he knows nothing about. Therefore, I would say that Krugman proves my point.

ERIC SAVITZ, BARRON'S: Let's start with an area where I think we can agree, which is that reporting and editorial writing for the most part are two separate disciplines -- but they overlap. Good editorial writers should also be good reporters; they should work the phones, talk to people and find things out, as opposed to sitting in a thinking chair and simply spouting opinions. And on the other hand, the fact that news writing increasingly contains elements of opinion is a reflection of the need for print publications to adapt to a world in which the Internet delivers news developments in a flash, leaving the rest of us to focus on analysis and enterprise. But that's another thread entirely...

And let me make one more distinction, which is between columnists and editorial writers. At least with Krugman if you disagree with his analysis, you can go after him personally; his name is always signed. I wonder if some of this would actually be addressed by a little more personal accountability -- let the editorial writers sign their editorials. While the idea of unsigned editorials I suppose is to make them the voice of the publication, they lead to a certain avoidance of responsibility, I think, which would be helped if they were credited to the person who actually wrote them, which would let the reader judge whether to take them seriously or not.

Though I have not written many editorials, I did write a few while I was an editor at the Industry Standard. And they always had my name attached to them. I might also point out that all the editorials in Barron's, written primarily by our fine editorial page editor Tom Donlan, have bylines. Almost every publication bylines all their editorial content, other than The Economist. I'm not sure why they don't.

Oh, and one more thing: Can we agree that the same question applies to the edit pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times equally? I know this is a forum with a particular leaning on that score, but you can't single out the Times editorial writers as uninformed without asking about the credentials of the editorial boards at other publications.

Finally, let me ask this question: Congress, which is filled with lawyers, makes the laws. The AMA is run by doctors. Major league baseball is run by one of its owners. Alan Greenspan knows a thing or two about economics. Do you like the results from those institutions? On the other hand, Bill Gates doesn't have a degree in software engineering, but he built himself a pretty nice little software company. Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas, but seemed to figure out the computer industry. The writer Michael Lewis, a former bond trader, just wrote a book that has completely shaken up the baseball world. And he did it with good reporting.

SEATER: OK, here are a few reactions. Savitz and I may disagree on some aspects of this issue, but I think we agree on much more.

(1) I totally agree that we should apply the same standards to the Wall Street Journal as the New York Times. I know for certain that whoever on the Journal board writes those editorials complaining about the Phillips curve, the natural rate of unemployment, and NAIRU doesn't understand any of those things.

(2) Congress is filled with lawyers, but lawyers have no special qualifications for writing law. They are trained to use (or maybe abuse) the law that other people write. Similarly, race car drivers are trained to drive cars, not to design them. I think Congress would be a much better place if it had very few lawyers and lots of plumbers, carpenters, stock brokers, personnel managers, and so on. A few historians, political scientists, philosophers, priests, and even economists would add useful perspectives that would improve the legislative process. That's not the way it is, and maybe that is part of the reason we get so much bad law.

It is an interesting question why Congress is so heavily dominated by lawyers. I have asked lawyers, who say it is an old question but don't have a good answer. My instinct is what you would expect from an economist: lawyers have the most to gain from controlling the legislative process, so they naturally gravitate to it. I haven't thought that opinion through and have no evidence to support it, but it is my initial hypothesis. Anyway, I don't think training in law has much to do with ability to make good law, anymore than training in journalism has much to do with writing good editorials. Lawyers can be good legislators, just as journalists can write good editorials, but it's not legal or journalistic training that makes them that way.

(3) As for the AMA, it seems to represent the interests of its members pretty well, which is all it is supposed to do. Its president would have the experience and training to write an informed (though not necessarily unbiased) editorial about regulation of the medical industry. I am not a baseball fan and pay no attention to the sport; so I can make no informed comment on it. (The game bores me, but I doubt that is because the sport is run by the owner of one of the teams.) Greenspan has done a very good job over his tenure as Fed chairman, following Paul Volcker's lead and continuing to squeeze inflation out of the economy. William Miller, who was a businessman appointed to the chairmanship by President Carter, made a mess of things in the one year he had the job. In any case, Greenspan certainly has the credentials to write an informed editorial about the economy. Bill Gates and Michael Dell succeeded precisely because they knew already knew a lot about computers when they left college. Neither one just dropped out of college and then decided on a lark that hey, you know what, I think I'd like to become a computer magnate. They left college to spend more time doing what they already knew how to do. Given the experience they subsequently acquired, they undoubtedly now could write informed editorials about the computer industry. I don't know who Michael Lewis is or what his book is about.

(4) I don't see the relevance of all this to my original point. The New York Times editorial board comprises people who have no training or experience in the fields they write about. I expect them to write ignorant editorials, and they regularly validate my expectation. My presumption is that a major reason they write such bad editorials is that they have virtually no understanding of the issues they write about.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:22 AM | link    

Thursday, July 31, 2003