Marketing Economics

Imagine two companies develop competing products. The first company's product is better, but the firm does nothing to promote it. As a result, consumers buy mostly from the second company.

The first company would have no right to complain that the world is unfair. Marketing is a vital part of product development. A company that fails to do marketing deserves to fail.

Mark Thomas complains (via The Everyday Economist) that policy people at think tanks such as the AEI and Cato are given at least as much respect as academic economists. Actually, I suspect that the average economist at the AEI or Cato has much more influence on the world of journalism and politics than does the average economist at a top ten economics department.

Think tanks put a lot of effort into promoting their work to the general public. Many economists, in contrast, are satisfied if their results get published in an academic journal that non-specialist don't read. Academic economists have to understand that if we don't put significant effort into promoting and explaining our work to the general public (or at least the subset of the well-educated general public interested in economic issues) then we will have minimal influence on the world.

Of course, some academic economists could respond by saying that there is no way they could make their results interesting and understandable to non-economists. But I believe that the proliferation of economic blogs somewhat falsifies this point.