Making Economics Public: The Hows and Whys of Communicating Markets and Models

Economics – macro, micro and mysterious – is integral to everyday life. But despite its importance for personal and collective decision making, it is a discipline often viewed as technical, arcane and inaccessible and thus overlooked in public discourse. This book is a call to arms to bring the discipline of economics more into the public domain. It calls on economists to think about how to make their knowledge of the economics public. And it calls on those who specialise in communicating expert knowledge to help us learn to communicate about economics. The book brings together scholars and practitioners working at the early stages of an emerging field: the public communication of, and public engagement with, economics. Through a series of short essays from academics and practitioners, the book has two key goals: first and foremost, it will make a case for why we need to make economics public and for the importance of having a clear vision of what it means to make economics public. Secondly, it suggests some ways that this can be done featuring contributions from practitioners, including economists, who are engaging audiences in newspapers, museums and beyond. This book is essential reading for those in economics with an interest in making economics public and those already in the many fields dedicated to communicating expert knowledge in public spaces who have an interest in where economics can fit.

More information about the book can be found here: https://www.makingeconomicspublic.org/

Vicki Macknight works in the Centre for Science Communication at the University of Otago. Her work has been published in a range of journals. She is the author of Imagining Classrooms: Stories of Children, Teaching and Ethnography (2016).

Fabien Medvecky is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Science Communication at the University of Otago. Armed with graduate degrees in Philosophy and Economics, he studies the relationship between knowledge and society and how social interactions shape, create and direct what counts as knowledge. Dr Medvecky is especially interested in areas that are challenging and uncomfortable, from ethical and justice issues in communicating information to questions over contentious or controversial science and technologies (gene tech, alternative medicine, etc.). He also has a long-running interest in how economics (the discipline, not the economy) is made public and how that interacts with other forms of knowledge and expertise.