Questions to Ask an Economist
Questions for talking with an economist about their own field: what the evidence supports, where it is genuinely contested, how good the forecasts have been, and what would change their mind.
The questions
Open any question for the note
What do you actually work on day to day?
Why ask it
Economics is a wide profession, and most days involve data cleaning, code, teaching and referee reports rather than pronouncements about the economy. The answer tells you which questions this person can speak to with real authority.
Which field are you in: macro, labour, development, industrial organisation?
Why ask it
Subfields use different methods and carry different confidence levels. A labour economist working with payroll records and a macroeconomist working with models are doing dissimilar jobs, and asking stops you directing every question to the wrong one.
What is a result in your field that most people would find surprising?
Why ask it
Invites something concrete from inside their expertise rather than a general principle. Good answers name a specific finding and its evidence, and the surprise usually comes from a mechanism people had not considered rather than a contrarian headline.
What does the evidence show clearly, and where is it genuinely contested?
Why ask it
Separating the settled from the disputed is the single most useful thing an economist can do for a non-specialist. Anyone who cannot draw that line, or who presents their whole field as resolved, has told you something about themselves.
What do economists broadly agree on that the public does not?
Why ask it
There are questions where professional surveys show strong agreement and public opinion does not follow, and the gaps are informative. Ask why the gap persists, since the honest answer usually implicates how economists communicate.
Which piece of your own work has held up, and which has not?
Why ask it
Few researchers volunteer that a paper failed to replicate or was overturned by later data. Asking for both halves in one question makes the admission easier, and the answer is the best available signal of intellectual honesty.
How much do you trust the data you use?
Why ask it
Measurement is the quiet problem in a great deal of applied work: revisions, sampling gaps, definitions that changed mid-series, activity that goes uncounted. Economists hold detailed views on this and are almost never asked for them.
When you say a policy works, what are you measuring, and who is outside that measure?
Why ask it
Forces the metric into the open. Aggregate gains routinely coexist with concentrated losses, and the second half is how you find out whether the claim covers the people you were actually asking about.
What is the strongest argument against the position you hold?
Why ask it
The steelman question. Someone who can build the opposing case in detail is worth listening to. Someone who can only characterise it as ignorance or bad faith has stopped engaging with the argument.
Which assumptions in your field do you find hardest to defend?
Why ask it
Every model rests on assumptions its own users find uncomfortable, about rationality, expectations, market clearing, or how firms actually set prices. This gets you an honest tour of the limits from someone inside them.
How accurate have forecasts in your area actually been?
Why ask it
Forecast records are checkable, and most are worse than public confidence suggests. A candid answer separates short-horizon forecasts, conditional projections and long-run predictions, which are three different activities usually reported as one.
What would change your mind about the thing you are most confident about?
Why ask it
Asks for a falsification condition. A specific answer, a particular result, a data revision, a natural experiment coming out the other way, marks a working researcher. No answer at all marks something else.
Which economic idea gets misused most often in public argument?
Why ask it
Economists watch their concepts get flattened in debate and generally keep a list: comparative advantage, efficiency, moral hazard, opportunity cost. The answer improves how you read the news that same week.
In your own work, how do you separate cause from correlation?
Why ask it
Identification is the central technical concern in applied economics, and the answer will name the tools: natural experiments, instruments, difference in differences, regression discontinuity. If it cannot be explained plainly, that is worth noting.
What does the profession still not have a good answer to?
Why ask it
Invites them to describe an open problem instead of defending the field. Answers tend to be substantial: why measured productivity growth slowed, how expectations form, what makes inflation persistent, why some countries converge and others do not.
Who funds your research, and does it shape what you study?
Why ask it
Funding shapes agendas mainly through what becomes feasible to study rather than through instructed conclusions. Asking about grants, consulting, industry contracts and data access is an ordinary question and the answer is usually straightforward.
How much do your own politics shape which questions you find interesting?
Why ask it
Values enter at question selection, long before any result. A researcher who can describe how their priors influence what they choose to study is being more useful than one who claims perfect neutrality.
Which country's experience changed how you think?
Why ask it
Country cases are how many economists actually changed their minds, and the examples are concrete: a reform that worked unexpectedly, a crisis that broke a model, an episode that refused to behave. Far better than asking about international comparison in general.
What should I read to be able to argue with you competently?
Why ask it
Asking to be equipped as an opponent, rather than as a convert, gets you the strongest material from both sides. It also signals that you intend to check the claims rather than collect them.
What is a question about the economy you would refuse to answer, and why?
Why ask it
Economists are asked constantly for market calls, rate predictions and stock tips. Where they place their own limit shows how seriously they take the difference between their expertise and their opinion.
Getting a useful answer
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
How to frame the question
Ask about mechanisms, not verdicts
Whether a policy is good is a political question with an economic component inside it. Asking how it works, who pays, who gains and over what timescale gets you the part they are qualified to answer.
Ask for the size, not just the direction
Almost any effect exists to some degree, so the magnitude is the whole argument. Push for numbers, ranges, and how much of the variation the finding actually explains before treating it as settled.
Separate the measurement from the value judgement
That a tax reduces employment by a certain amount is a measurement. That this makes it a bad tax involves a view about who matters and how much. Asking which one you are being given keeps the conversation honest.
Ask what would settle the disagreement
If a dispute is empirical, someone can name the evidence that would resolve it. If nobody can, the disagreement is probably about values, and it is more productive to discuss it as one.
Who you are actually talking to
An academic economist
Their authority is narrow and deep. Ask about their own literature and you will get precision. Ask for next year's growth rate and you are getting an educated guess, roughly as good as anyone else's.
A bank or market economist
Producing near-term views for clients is part of the job, so forecast questions get answered readily. Ask what their institution's house view is and how their own position relates to it.
A government or central bank economist
There will be subjects they cannot discuss, particularly live policy. Ask about method and history rather than intention, and do not read careful phrasing as evasion.
A development or field economist
Ask about the setting: who collected the data, what the local institutions were, and how much of the result they would expect to travel to anywhere else. External validity is the live question in that work.
What not to ask
- Do not ask for investment advice. Most economists are not investment professionals, and the ones who are will not give it away in conversation.
- Avoid asking whether the economy is good or bad. Ask about one measure, for one group, over one period.
- Do not treat one economist as the profession. Disagreement is normal, and quoting an individual as though they speak for economics misrepresents both.
- Skip the argument you already had online. Arriving with a grievance rather than a question makes the conversation about you.
- Use recession, inflation and unemployment carefully, since each has a technical definition and loose usage sends the answer into a definitional correction.
- Do not ask them to predict the next crisis. Crises are identified once they are under way, and pressing only produces a number nobody believes.