Doing Economics

3.6 Talks for Lay Audiences
Sooner or later, a researcher will be asked to talk about her research to a lay
audience—that is, an audience composed in part or in whole of people who
do not have a PhD in economics or related disciplines. This could be a

---

research talk given to a multidisciplinary audience, a talk given to policy
makers or business decision-makers, or an outreach talk given to a trade
group, politicians, members of one’s community, or at a local school. This
section discusses what to keep in mind when giving such talks.
Multidisciplinary Research Talks. When they congregate with researchers
from other disciplines, there is sometimes an unpleasant tendency among
economists to think of themselves as the smartest people in the room. But
let us get one thing straight: if markets are efficient—or even just minimally
inefficient—there will be really smart people in every discipline. Therefore,
when giving a multidisciplinary research talk, it helps to think of your
audience as being composed of the smartest undergraduates you have
encountered. It also helps to realize that such audiences generally care more
about your findings and the external validity of your findings than they do
about internal validity. Indeed, whereas you will have to work hard to make
a general economics audience care about your work, a multidisciplinary
audience will usually have selected to come to your talk because they care
about the topic. They are unlikely to care, however, about the intricacies of
your identification strategy, and compared to an audience of economists,
they are more likely to trust that you know what you are doing. This does
not mean that these details should be kept from them if they ask (for
example, smart undergraduates can understand why a valid instrumental
variable can yield causal identification when it is clearly explained to
them). Ultimately, what matters to such an audience is how they can use
your findings in their own work. In the best of cases, giving good
multidisciplinary research talks can lead to opportunities to do
interdisciplinary research, if that is something you are interested in doing.
Policy or Business Talks. Much like a multidisciplinary research audience
member cares about how she can use your findings in her own research, an
audience of policy makers or business decision-makers will care about how
they can use what you tell them in their own work. The difference is that
policy makers and business decision-makers will often be interested in
more than what a single, necessarily narrow research paper does. Rather,
they will be interested in the sum total of what your field has had to say
about a specific problem they are grappling with. So if it helps to think
about a multidisciplinary research audience as an audience of the smartest
undergraduates you have encountered, it helps to think about a policy or
business audience as your average group of undergraduates. Here, unless

---

you have been asked to talk about a specific paper, stylized facts and broad
descriptive statistics tend to be useful to your audience, as are specific
stories and anecdotes conveying the points you want to make.
Outreach Talks. Every once in a while, you may be asked to do some
outreach. Typically, this means giving a talk to non-academics about
something you are more qualified to talk about than the average individual.
This can take several forms: a talk at a government or international agency,
a briefing to political staff, a testimony to lawmakers, a presentation to
industry experts, or even a short presentation of what it is that you do for
work at a local school. But outreach can also take on other forms, such as
appearing on the radio or on television to comment on current events.
In most cases, outreach involves sharing your expertise with people who
are likely to benefit from your doing so. What “sharing your expertise”
means can vary wildly from one context to another. At one extreme, you
might get paid a princely sum for presenting some descriptive statistics that
are only somewhat related to your core research interests to industry
experts.
In my experience, the one principle that ties all of these activities
together is this: if you enjoy doing the kind of outreach you have been
asked to do and would like to get asked again, be as clear as you can, and
do not be sloppy.
When I write “be as clear as you can,” understand that though you might
get further in some corners of the economics profession by being arcane,
simplicity and clarity are what you were asked to do outreach for. Can you
take a complex concept or empirical finding and explain it to someone who
has never taken an economics class? That is the level at which to pitch a lot
of outreach activities.
7
When I write “do not be sloppy,” what I mean is that you should make
sure that what you say is backed by rigorous research, and be mindful of the
fact that in some cases, your words can have drastic consequences on
someone else’s welfare. To give one extreme example, in Texas Beef Group
v. Winfrey, TV show host Oprah Winfrey and one of her guests were sued
by beef producers under food libel laws (specifically, Texas’ False
Disparagement of Perishable Food Products Act of 1995) for linking the
consumption of beef to mad cow disease after beef futures and beef prices
fell significantly the day after they made those statements. So when I was

---

asked by the New York Times to write an op-ed about my findings on
farmers markets and foodborne illness, I hemmed and hawed for a moment
while I double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked my data, code, and findings
to make sure that what I was saying was backed by a rigorous analysis.
8
After that experience, a colleague who does a number of live media
appearances (where it can be trickier to ensure that every claim you make is
backed by rigorous research) recommended I get business insurance, which
covers you in case you get sued for things you do that are work-related but
not your work itself. Though that kind of insurance may not be available in
every country (if only because most countries are nowhere near as litigious
as the US), if you plan on doing a lot of outreach or consulting, it may be
wise to look into getting that kind of insurance, which costs about as much
as a reasonably priced intercontinental flight.