Social Econ Blog

As I mentioned in class today, one hypothesis for the growth in the popularity of economics is a decline in the demand for skills (e.g., written communication) that some other concentrations are assumed to specialize in producing. Formal letters and memos have been replaced by IM, email, and cheap voice communication (e.g., cell-phones). Exclusively intuitive/verbal arguments have been replaced by increasingly empirical and theoretical arguments/reports.

While new technologies make communication cheap, we clearly make a trade-off between quality and quantity. People frequently write e-mails as if they were speaking. Crafting an email which carefully conveys our thoughts and feelings is costly, so we cheat and just type the words that we would say. However, this evidence suggests that a substantial proportion of recipients misconstrue the tone of our email. Given that there can be real costs associated with unclear or misinterpreted communications, people who are more skilled at conveying their thoughts quickly and clearly via email should have more porductive email exchanges. Perhaps, these sort of findings will encourage more investment in written communication skills and (if these forms of communication are important and if these concentrations actually create/reveal people with better written communications skills) offset some of the trend toward analytic/quantitative concentrations.