The New York Times, until now, has had three economics columns. Economic Scene
was written by economists: it rotated between Tyler Cowen,
Austan Goolsbee, Robert Frank, and Hal
Varian. Economic View was written by journalists, including Daniel
Altman, Dan Gross, and Louis Uchitelle.
Finally, Times staffer David Leonhardt had his own Wednesday
column, Economix.
Today, all that changed.
Leonhardt’s column is still there, but it is now called Economic Scene. And
so the question arises: if Economix has become Economic Scene, what has happened
to the Economic Scene of old? Leonhardt answered
that at the end of his column: it has become Economic View. All the old
Scene columnists bar Varian will be squeezed into View, along with new columnists
Greg Mankiw, Alan Blinder, Judith
Chevalier, Robert Shiller, and Lester Thurow.
(Varian apparently doesn’t have the time to continue to write for newspapers,
now he’s working for Google.)
For those of you keeping count at home, that’s eight high-profile
economists sharing one slot in the Sunday newspaper.
And what’s happened to Economic View? Leonhardt doesn’t come right out and
say so, but it seems to have been killed off entirely.
Was there too much economics in the NYT, which is literally shrinking
in August and might need to make cuts? Elsewhere in the NYT there’s Paul
Krugman, of course, with his own op-ed columns, but those are rarely
particularly economics-based these days. And every so often the Levitt
‘n’ Dubner team writes a Freakonomics column in the Sunday magazine
– there have been four of those so far this year.
This is not good news for economic discourse in the mainstream press. One column
every two months is not much of a platform: it will take years for readers to
get a decent feel for where each of the columnists stands. And while the Economic
View column was not always scintillating, it was a million times better than
the half page of undigested tripe filed every week by the dreadful Ben
Stein. To kill View but to keep Stein alive betrays a sense of priorities
which can’t bode well for the NYT Business section.