At the end of 2011 I started writing my mainly macro blog. A key motivation was the poor standard of the public debate about austerity, and as a result most of my blog posts were designed to be read by non-economists. My own academic area includes the study of how changes in government spending and taxes influence the economy, and I knew that the models used by people in my field did not support the policies of the day. Yet this knowledge was rarely given a voice.

There are plenty of economists appearing in the media, but they tend to be City economists because they are much better at making up plausible stories about daily market movements. The financial crisis does not seem to have led the media to question how many of these stories are actually true. However, when it comes to policy issues like austerity City economists are generally more biased and less knowledgeable than academics. In addition, the excellent economists in the Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) are experts on the impact of specific taxes and benefits on individual behaviour (part of microeconomics), but not on how austerity might influence total output, employment and inflation (part of macroeconomics). It was this macroeconomic analysis that seemed absent from the public debate, and I hoped in 2011 that by taking the then unusual step of being a UK academic economist who blogs I could make a small difference.

My blog posts tried to explain, in non-technical terms, why the markets did not force the UK to undertake austerity, and why austerity would do serious damage to the economy. As the UK government would all too often point to the Eurozone as the reason why austerity was necessary, I started exploring the real reasons why the Eurozone crisis happened, which were rather different from those given in the media. Although at first I expected my blog posts to be mainly read by my students, I soon found myself interacting with blogging economists in the United States, and discovering that my posts were being read by those advising policymakers in the UK and international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But I also found that many non-economists were reading my blog because they had a desire for real expertise on macroeconomic issues explained in a non-technical way.