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Mark Thoma tackles the question of why--and how--the field of economics retreated from what he calls its "public mission," in an essay for the Institute for Public Knowledge . While once a discipline that engaged routinely with citizens and leaders in the public sector, Economics spent much of the latter half of the twentieth century exploring issues that, while important, were not part of the general discourse. Thoma calls this "The Great Disconnect," and he examines several reasons for it: Mathematics and the Desire to be a Scientific Discipline ...Michael Bernstein makes this point as well, as the discipline became more and more mathematical – the language we speak is increasingly symbolic rather than verbal – it became less accessible to outsiders. Positive and Normative Economics ...economists have become less willing to take sides in public debates, and more importantly unwilling to wade into public debates when doing so can be perceived as supporting one side over the other. Sociological Factors ...As economics has become increasingly mathematical and theoretical, it has also become more cliquish. Interest in Different Questions ...The fact that those inside and outside of academics are interested in different questions may have also play a role in severing the ties of academics to the outside world. The result, Thoma argues, is bad for the field, for economists, and for society in general: For all of these reasons, economics lost communication with policymakers and practitioners leaving room for all sorts of “charlatans and cranks” to fill the void. In doing so, academics ceded important ground to think tanks aligned with one party or the other, to self-appointed economic experts, to business economists maximizing profit rather than public knowledge, and to a media that doesn’t always comprehend the economics that underlie a particular issue. Even in cases where there actually was fairly wide agreement among academic economists about a particular policy proposal, the public debate in the media did not convey that economists were largely united on the issue. But there is good news. The last five years have brought about a lot of positive change. Thanks to social media and blogging, more and more economists are writing for a public audience. Thoma has seen the benefits of engaging with the public through his own blog, Economist's View (one of many daily reads for The Watch). He extols the virtues of blogging and writing for the public at large in the second half of his essay. Read New Forms of Communication and the Public Mission of Economics: Overcoming the Great Disconnect here .

Christina Romer , chair of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers until last month, is back at her post in the University of California-Berkeley's economics department. And she will be writing a column for the New York Times (in the Sunday Business section). Her first column hit newsstands (wherever there are still newsstands) yesterday. In it, Romer argues that, while cutting the federal deficit is important, "now is not the time." Some advocates of austerity argue that, contrary to the conventional view, fiscal tightening now would lower long-term interest rates and improve confidence so much that the impact could be positive. But an ambitious new study in the World Economic Outlook of the International Monetary Fund confirms that fiscal consolidations — that is, deliberate deficit reductions — typically reduce growth substantially. The study considers a wide range of advanced economies over the last three decades, so it doesn’t put too much weight on unusual episodes or focus on examples supporting particular conclusions. It also breaks new ground by looking specifically at times when governments changed taxes or spending with the aim of reducing deficits. Previous studies looked at summary measures of the budget situation, and likely included cases when strong economic performance caused lower deficits, not the other way around. The recent experience of countries already carrying out austerity measures is consistent with the central finding of the I.M.F. study. Ireland, Greece and Spain have all had rising unemployment after moving to cut deficits. Taking budget actions now that would further increase unemployment would be not only cruel, but also short-sighted. The longer unemployment remains high, the more likely it is to become permanent as workers’ skills deteriorate and they gradually drop out of the labor force. Such a situation would be terrible for both the affected workers and the long-run budget situation. Imagine a patient with a slow-growing tumor who is also recovering from pneumonia. The outcome is likely to be worse if the patient is not given time to recover before undergoing surgery. Read Now Isn’t the Time to Cut the Deficit here .

Economists the world over have been trying to determine the potential economic impact of the swine flu outbreak. Olivier Blanchard, the chief economist for the IMF, speaking at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace yesterday, said " The information that we have at this stage is it is a relatively minor (economic ) event ." And yet Bloomberg reports that there is a possibility the price tag could reach $3 trillion: Regardless of what the long term impact will be on the global economy, it is clear that Mexico's economy is already taking a hit . And Mexico's problems will likely affect the US economy in at least two ways , according to Ali Veshi, CNN's chief business correspondent: 1) America’s travel industry could lose a lot in a health crisis. As mentioned earlier, U.S. travel companies have already started responding to concerns about travel to Mexico, which only accounts for a small percentage of overall revenue. The real concern for the industry going forward is the fallout the flu scare could have on domestic travel, which accounts for almost 90 percent of total revenue. 2) U.S. agriculture exports could suffer. As with Russia’s recent example, many countries responded with bans on U.S. meat imports when small outbreaks of mad cow disease and foot-and-mouth disease led to some culling of herds in this country — bans that took years to overturn. Meanwhile, Simon Johnson says economists should take note of how public health officials respond to crisis as compared with leaders of the financial sector. The biggest issue, of course, is that pre-emptively organizing for and dealing with health pandemics does nothing to ruffle the feathers of powerful interests in the health sector , be it doctors, health care providers, insurers or drug companies. They have built a system that derives its value partly from our being (appropriately, for the most part) worried. In contrast, while finance talks a lot about risk, those involved in it have tried to create the impression that they understand and can manage risks — so, for a (modest?) fee, you don’t have anything to worry about. This, it turns out, is incorrect. Sounds like he is glad economists aren't called upon to solve the swine flu outbreak. Read his full post here .

The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog asked the Feldsteins, Shillers, and Mankiws of the world for suggestions on the best way to spend $8 a week--the amount most Americans will see added to their paycheck as a result of tax credits in the stimulus bill. Here's the response of Adam Posen , of the Peterson Institute for International Economics : Invest in human capital through existing institutions: buy $8 of cupcakes at the PTA bake sale; attend a lecture at a community college ($8 admission); purchase a book on personal finance or retraining - any of these get spending into the economy with no lag, but also improve your or your family’s future productivity. The whole post is a must-read. Get it here .