We explore recent arguments that economists may not serve to enlighten their publics so much as foster surplus confusion and doubt concerning controversies in their areas of expertise, particularly with regard to the recent worldwide economic crisis. After describing agnotology, the new area of...

John Maynard Keynes is well known for his work in government and academia, but much less is made of his flourishing career in journalism, where he sought to influence events and ideas as an outsider. However, his version of the insider-outsider distinction was not the conventional one, for it...

This essay argues that the term public intellectual is too narrow for historical research about the public influence of economists and economic expertise. We propose, instead, the concept of public interventions to inform a more comprehensive approach that broadens the analytical frame by...

The essays in this volume examine the economist as public intellectual. Rather than assessing the changing status of the public intellectual in culture or attempting to define the identity of the public intellectual, our approach is to study the public interventions of economists, that is, the...

It is hard to think of a more committed public intellectual in Britain in the twentieth century than Lionel Robbins—except, of course, John Maynard Keynes. For six decades Robbins engaged in public debate on economic policy issues in lectures and talks, contributions to newspapers and...

The American economist Irving Fisher (1867-1947) combined his work as a scientific economist, addressed to his fellow economists, with sustained and vigorous participation in public discourse, trying to change public policy and to reform attitudes and behavior by teaching policymakers and the...

In 1977 John Kenneth Galbraith hosted the documentary series The Age of Uncertainty on public television; three years later Milton Friedman hosted a competing series, Free to Choose. This essay examines the development of these two projects, examining both the institutions that supported them...

Walter Lippmann was the most respected American journalist of the twentieth century. During the Great Depression and World War II he devoted most of his thrice-weekly columns in the New York Herald Tribune to exploring the causes of recession and the economics of war. He was a student of George...

This essay analyzes what Gary S. Becker and Richard A. Posner have written for various media (either in print or online) that are not strictly aimed at academic audiences. We provide an historical account of how they became interested in such activities, from their first attempts, made...