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What I've learned aboutwriting economicsHal R. VarianPublished online: 08 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: Hal R. Varian (2001) What I've learned about writingeconomics, Journal of Economic Methodology, 8:1, 131-134, DOI:10.1080/13501780010023298

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13501780010023298

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1 INTRODUCTION

I’ve written:

° many academic papers;° a graduate textbook, M icroeconomic Analysis;° an undergraduate textbook, Intermediate M icroeconomics;° a business strategy book, Information Rules;° several articles for the popular press; and° monthly columns, in The Industry S tandard and the New Y ork T imes.

About the only thing I have not tried is a comic book, although this was myoriginal ambition in life.

All of these endeavours have been pretty successful. The graduate bookdominated the � eld for 15 years and is still widely used. The undergraduatebook is available in 14 languages, and my publisher claims it is the most widelyused intermediate microeconomics book in the world. The business strategybook, co-authored with my colleague Carl Shapiro, made the Business W eekbest seller list and was the top business book on Amazom.com for severalmonths. I’m not sure how many people read the newspaper columns, but itseems to be enough to generate some crank mail.

I will be the � rst to admit that much of this success of this is due to luck.There is a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time. However, Ithink that I’ve learned some things from these experiences, and what I havelearned is likely worth passing on to other aspiring authors.

F irst, I o¡er some general lessons that apply to all forms of writing. Themost important single thing is to know your audience. At the very outset youshould form a clear idea of who you are writing for. Once you understand whoyour audience is, the next question to ask is why they should be interested inwhat you have to say. Do they want to be educated, informed, enlightened, orentertained? And why are you the person who can do it? If, after sobercontemplation of these questions, you still want to proceed, you will be in a farbetter position to resolve the countless choices that arise when you write.

Journal of Economic M ethodology 8:1, 131–134 2001

What I’ve learned about writing economicsHal R. Varian

Journal of Economic Methodology ISSN 1350-178X print/ISSN 1469-942 7 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd

http://www.tandf.co.uk /journals

DOI: 10.1080/1350178001002329 8

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When you have to make a decision, you simply ask ‘What does my audiencewant?’ If you have a good idea of who your audience is, you should be able toanswer this question.

The next important thing to do is to choose a good co-author. I’ve hadthe fortune of writing with Ted Bergstrom and Carl Shapiro, both ofwhom not only produce excellent prose themselves, but are also greateditors for my prose. It is critical to have a sounding board. The bluessinger Taj Mahal says, ‘if you can’t get a wife, get a band’. My advice forauthors is: ‘if you can’t get a co-author, get an editor’. You need to havesomeone with good taste who can read your writing and tell you whatworks and what does not.

2 TEXTBOOKS

The most important aid to writing a textbook is to teach the class for whichyour book is intended. This seems obvious, but you would be surprised at howoften this guideline is violated. Several years ago a very well-known economistdecided to write a principles book. When he sought my advice, I told himhe had to teach the class. He reluctantly agreed . . . but he only taught a30-student honors section!Needless to say, this experience did not help him todevelop su¤cient empathy with potential adopters of his book, who had toteach 600-person classes of students with widely varying ability.

When you teach the class, listen to the feedback from the students. Whatyou are teaching all seems obvious to you, but it sure doesn’t to them, and itprobably did not to you, the � rst time you studied it. Your job as a teacher isto help the students understand the material, and you can’t do that e¡ectivelyunless you know what they do not understand.

Some of the best advice I ever got about writing a textbook was fromRichard Hamming, winner of the Turing Award, the closest thing computerscience has to a Nobel prize. He said ‘Get together the exercises and examsthat you expect the students to be able to solve once they’ve read your book,then write the book that shows them how to solve them’. The great thingabout this advice is that it focuses you on the outcome you want to produce. Ifyou understand both where your audience is coming from, as I advocatedearlier, and where you want them to be, it’s not that hard to write the bookthat helps them make the transition.

If the goal is to convey knowledge to the student that will allow them tosolve problems, then it is important to put in a lot of examples of problem-solving in the book. You cannot have too many examples. Verbal, numeric,algebraic, graphical – you need everything, since di¡erent students � nddi¡erent sorts of examples compelling.

When I say ‘get the exercises together’, I do not just mean mathematicalexercises. That is important for some areas, but, at the undergraduate level atleast, we are educating students to be citizens, and examples drawn from

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polit ical platforms, newspaper op ed pieces, and the evening news are just asimportant as the analytic examples.

F inally, you should strive to make things easy for the students and theprofessor. When I wrote my undergraduate book I included a full set of theslides I used in my own lectures. I did the same thing with my business strategybook. It’s hardly any extra e¡ort if you follow my advice to teach the classbefore you write the book. But teaching materials are a big help to people whomay want to use your textbook.

3 BUSINESS BOOKS

Writing Information Rules was an experiment. Carl Shapiro and I were bothvery interested in reaching a new audience, and we spent a lot of time thinkingabout who, exactly, the book was for. We already had quite a bit of materialthat we had pulled together for our teaching, research and consulting, so wehad a good base of material to start with.

One of the most di¤cult things about writing a ‘business book’ is how youphrase things. One good piece of advice is: ‘Don’t say what is, say what to do’.As scientists, we naturally like to describe things; our goal, after all, is todevelop a better understanding of the world. But the readers of a businessbook do not necessarily share this goal. Their focus is on deciding what to do.So instead of saying ‘price discrimination can increase pro� ts’ you should say‘charge users according to their value, not according to your costs’.

Whatever you do, do not use the passive voice! ‘Pro� ts can be increasedthrough the use of price discrimination’ is about the worst way to phrase theidea. The decision makers disappear when you use the passive voice – hardlythe right way to think about either social science or management!

This price discrimination example also illustrates another important point:you should try to use terminology that is meaningful to the reader. I hate tosay it, but economist terminology is terrible. Economic jargon just doesn’tconvey much meaning to the average reader. ‘Rent’ is a nice example. It is animportant concept, no doubt about it, but your typical reader just will notunderstand the subtleties without a lot of explanation. ‘Pro� t’ they under-stand (or at least think they do) and it’s probably a better term in most cases.

F inally there is the point I made earlier about making things simple for thereader. Callouts (those phrases in bold scattered through the text) andtakeaway lists (the lists of points to remember at the end of the chapter) areuseful tools for this purpose. They are also a big help to you as an author: ifyou � nd that you have written two or three pages and you cannot come upwith a one-sentence summary of what you’ve said, you should worry that youare just treading water. Perhaps you should cut some of that excess verbiage.Similarly, if you come to the end of the chapter and you don’t have half-a-dozen non-trivial lessons learned, you should probably go back and rethinkthe chapter.

W hat I’ve learned about writing economics 133

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My � nal advice is to tell a lot of stories. Business readers can tolerate someabstractions, but what really grabs them are stories. The closer these storiescome to the problems they face, the better. Remember they want to knowwhat to do – so stories about what others have done, and how these choiceshave turned out, send a powerful message.

4 COLUMNS

I have to say that this is the place where I have had the least experience, soperhaps you should regard my advice as tentative at best. I have only beenwriting columns for a few years, and I still � nd it hard going. Some columnswrite themselves, but some require hours of agonizing over details. Maybesomeday, when it all becomes easy, I will write a revized version of thissection.

The critical advice here is to get to the point as soon as possible. Thisusually means the � rst sentence or two. You are competing for the attention ofthe reader with everything else in the newspaper, so you need a grabber to getthem to read your column.

My second piece of advice is to pace yourself. You’ve got a word count, andyou’ve got to meet it. When I wrote 750-columns I thought of them as sprints:you rush out of the box, hit your stride and zip through the � nish. You’ve onlygot time to develop one idea, or, alternatively toss o¡ a few undeveloped ideas.A 1000-word column is like a half-mile: you can develop an argument withtwo or three points. This is quite a bit harder to do since you do not really havethe space to make any arguments in depth. It is a challenge to both developand argument and keep the reader’s attention. It is something I am stillworking on, but I think I am getting there.

5 CONCLUSION

I realize that this essay is not about research methodology. But I havediscussed my views on that topic in other places and do not have much newto say about how to do economic research. But in a very real sense researchonly has an impact if it is communicated successfully. I do not know if‘methodology of communication of economics’ is a subject or not, but if not,it should be. Perhaps this essay can make a very slight contribution to that� eld.

Hal R . VarianUniversity of California, Berkeley

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