The Sorry State of Economic Journalism?

A friend of mine directs me to this piece by Peter Klein in which he rants against the “sorry state of economic journalism”:

Yglesias is representative of a new generation of blogger-journalists, such as Megan McArdle, Ezra Klein, and Felix Salmon, who express bold, confident opinions on all issues under the sun, without much substantive knowledge or understanding of any. These writers don’t do a lot of reporting, or investigating, but specialize in editorializing, even in what are ostensibly “news” items. Yglesias, in particular, excels in relationship reporting — which group is connected to which, who dislikes whom, what this person said about that person — but can’t take the time to learn the actual arguments under consideration.

There are plenty of technically unqualified bloggers (yours truly, in particular) hurling amateur propaganda into the blogosphere, touching on all mainstream social sciences.  But what came to mind while reading Klein’s piece was who we would be left with if these guys were somehow marginalized. For economics, we’d turn to Paul Krugman or Bryan Caplan; Jared Bernstein or Russ Roberts.  For law, maybe Jack Balkin or Eugene Volokh.  Though qualified, these guys are hardly in total agreement on the things on which they’re qualified to speak.  So how is it that so many really smart people disagree on, essentially, how to do their jobs?

It’s worth it to compare constitutional law and macroeconomics in this sense. Constitutional law is, in theory, about what the Constitution does and does not permit.  A few vague words provide ample room for scholars and judges to color their meaning with a particular ideology and cherry-picked historical “evidence”.  Economics, too, and macroeconomics in particular, is, as I understand it, the attempt to make cause-and-effect sense of large scale exchange of goods and services.  Unfortunately for us, there is historical evidence supporting the likes of both Mankiw and Krugman.  I suspect, in both law and economics, we use preferred aspects of each social science to argue for or against a particular ideology-based policy preference.

This isn’t so much a response to Klein (himself a Ron Paulian, by the way) as it is an expansion upon his point, I think.  Amateur, non-”qualified” bloggers may make mistakes that professionals in the particular field would not.  But even if they didn’t, I suspect we wouldn’t have that much more clarity on the issues…at least insofar as appealing to authority goes.