Mark Blyth became the accidental star of the political blogosphere last year when he appeared in a video promoting the key message behind his upcoming book ‘Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea’. Here he explains why being unreadable helps economists get their message across, how fan and hate mail have become part of his professional life and how his latest project illustrates that there is a market for academic ideas

Blyth, Mark

English

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.uk http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/2012/03/10/five-minutes-with-mark-blyth/Five minutes with Mark Blyth: “Turn it into thingspeople can understand, let go of the academese, andpeople will engage”Mar 10 2012Mark Blyth became the accidental star of the political blogosphere last year whenhe appeared in a video promoting the key message behind his upcoming book‘Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea’. Here he explains why beingunreadable helps economists get their message across, how fan and hate mailhave become part of his professional life and how his latest project illustrates thatthere is a market for academic ideas.  This article first appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Science blog Blogging and social media are growing more popular amongst academics in the UK, yetmany are still anxious about how to accurately express the message of their 10,000 wordarticle or book into a much shorter blog post. How did you manage to distil the ideas thatyour new book, Austerity, deals with into a five minute video?Truthfully, if an idea cannot be expressed in five minutes it’s probably not worth saying. I’ve beentelling my graduate students that for years and I happen to believe that it’s true. Academics think thattheir ideas are complex when in fact they are oftentimes just complexly expressed. That is,disciplinary training and conventions demand that we express ideas in a specific language, relatethem to ‘debates in the field,’ couch them as discrete hypotheses etc., all of which is fine and good,but it does tend to get in the way of the message.For example, one of the reasons economics is more successful than any other social sciencediscipline in getting its message across is that it’s unreadable. Really. Think about it. An article ineconomics has an abstract, usually in English, that anyone can understand. There is then a veryshort introduction before it dissolves into hyper-complex mathematics. If you skip all that, as almostall people in the policy world do, you then get to a very clear set of conclusions written in words-you-can-understand that ‘proves’ all the mathematics and the policy lessons derived therein. Comparethat to the task of reading a 12,000 word discipline-intoned history or political science article thatsays “one the one hand, on the other hand…” and you can see why less is more.Indeed, the problem for me was that the Austerity book began as a video. I said all I had to say infive minutes and now the task of turning that into a book becomes the arduous part. Yes, you canget into the details, prove contentions, etc., but at the end of the day does that make it any moreimpactful? That for me is an open question.The video of your brief discussion of Austerity has been circulated on popular political andacademic blogs in the UK months before it is due to be published. What impact has the useof multi-media video had both on your expectations for the text, and also, on yourengagement with the public on the issues that your research raises?First of all it’s a great advert for the book. However, since it came before the book and was notdesigned as a marketing piece for a book it does raise the pressure to get it out. But what it alsoshows is how there is a market – so to speak – for academic ideas. The two core ideas of thevideo (and the book) – that you can’t cure debt with more debt – and – that while any one state cancut its way to prosperity it can’t work if they all do it at the same time – are technically known as‘trying to fix a solvency problem with a liquidity instrument’ and ‘a fallacy of composition.’ Start byposing the problem in that language and its dead to anyone who is not an expert in the debatealready. Turn it into things people can understand, let go of the academese, and people willengage. The video was posted first on YouTube and was then massively reposted by Facebook. Igot fan mail and hate mail from all over the world. If you want impact this is how to do it. The old daysof doing an edited volume with your mates and publishing it a year and half later as ‘impact’ isincreasingly a dead model in an era of social media.Your use of multi-media technology is innovative. What role did your university, BrownUniversity, play in this? Did you find in them support and innovation, or a fear of theunknown?Hats off to Brown and the Watson Institute, it was their idea. Watson has a great media set up andthey came to me and said “if you were to make a five minute video on topic, what would it be?” Givethat the G20 meeting in Toronto had just come out with their ‘growth friendly fiscal consolidation’nonsense, the choice of topic was obvious. So they hooked me up with a videographer, JoePosner, we went back and forth on the script (he was great at teaching me how to translate myideas into ordinary language), we shot it, and he added the animation. The university and theinstitute were supportive from start to finish. I think the key lesson here is this is how smallerinstitutions can overcome geography and scale and get their ideas, and thus their academic name,out there.From your experience, do you think that multi-media tools will become a new, and perhapsprominent, form of dissemination of research to the public?I think that it already has. Think of TED talks and the numerous spinoffs that they have encouraged.People at all levels and all walks of life are time constrained. If you have something important to sayand can get it across in five minutes you will have a leg up on people doing a book or a specialissue that is read only by insiders. Let’s push it further. Why do we have people with great ideaswriting books and articles for publishers that almost no one ever reads? Mainly because ofthe rigours of academic promotion – getting your union card stamped. It’s a nice business model forpublishers, especially on the journal side, but it helps keep the academy separate from the widerpublic discussion.This is why blogs are also increasingly important. It helps people in the field know what other peopleare up to, to be sure, but it also helps your work to be found by journalists and others. Ten years agoI knew a tenure case where the candidate was (rumoured to have been) denied in part becausethey did this frivolous ‘blogging’ stuff. Ten years later I know of a case where it helped seal the dealfor promotion.Blogs with a more academic slant (crookedtimber.org being the best example) get work out to awider public much faster and to many more readers. I’ve done on line seminars on books andspecific topics in this manner and it’s great for feedback and impact. In short, I think that we arealready there. Ten years from now closed-source academic journals will exist to the extent thattenure committees need warranties. Other than that we will largely live in a world of open source andmultimedia.What do you think the role of academics should be when engaging with the public? Economic issues, particularly those underpinning austerity measures are dominant acrossgovernment, society and media. How do you hope your research will impact on these?I like to think of the social role of the academy as two fold. First, as knowledge generators, which isobvious. Second, as the ‘BS police,’ which is non-obvious and just as important. Our job is to testthe ideas out there in the world that are being used to guide policy and say ‘yes, that passes thesmell test’ or say ‘no, upon inspection, that’s BS and here’s why’ which is what the Austerity projectis all about.More broadly, and I can only speak from my area of knowledge, folks who get into the study ofpolitical economy do so (by and large) because they want to understand how the world works. Sincethis is inherently non-obvious, all their work should be of interest. The problem is that eitherdisciplinary obsessions and intellectual ghettos develop where publishing on topic X is rewarded nomatter how banal the research, or (increasingly) new graduate students get so ‘teched-up’ that theyare unable to say anything to anyone unless there is a readily available dataset and a series ofstandardized statistical techniques that can be applied. Again, this results from the reward structureof disciplines and not from the nature of academic ideas themselves. The incentives are changingdue to the world changing around the disciplines, but we call them ‘disciplines’ for a reason: this isexactly what they do.Economic issues that therefore just one area where the academy has a contribution to make. Publichealth, environment, energy, sustainability, conflict and violence – the list is literally endless – as arethe possibilities. Academics have hoped for generations that our ideas impact the world but veryfew succeed. Now there are technological ‘leg ups’ for those who choose to use them.The full video of Mark Blyth discussing austerity is available here. Please read our comments policy before posting.You may also be interested in the following posts (automatically generated):1. Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: “Blogging is quite simply, one of themost important things that an academic should be doing right now”.2. Five minutes with Martin Zaltz Austwick: “Our Head of Department sees academic podcastingas a key component in our impact and communication strategy.”3. Poorly targeted short term initiatives to revive the UK’s flagging growth rates are likely tomake things worse. Consistency in economic policy is key in delivering long-term growth.4. Engaging young people in big ideas should be just as important as the REF in the eyes ofacademics.

Five minutes with Mark Blyth: “Turn it into things people can understand, let go of the academese, and people will engage”

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