Joseph Sternberg

Joseph C. Sternberg is editorial-page editor and Political Economics columnist for the Wall Street Journal's European edition. His latest book is The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future (Public Affairs, 2019).



As a journalist, which aspects of economics are the most difficult to communicate?

The top thing is how little economists actually know. If you read any serious academic paper or book, there's a certain humility about the limits of any one model, and also about the limits of the data they have to work with. The problem is that when you're a journalist, you're keenly aware that your audience is busy and only has a few minutes to spend with you each day. You want to be able to give them a simple, actionable bottom line -- "If you increase X by 10%, economists say Y will decrease by 30%" or the like. Economics can't really do that, though. The paper on which that sentence is based actually says something like "If you increase X by 10%, an analysis of the particular data set we used found that 95% of the time Y will decrease by 30%, but that data set also suffers from A, B and C shortcomings that make it hard for us to understand precisely what's going on." You can see how difficult it is to put that into a news article or an opinion column, so it's a challenge to present readers with suggestive data points while also finding elegant, non-technical ways to alert readers to the pitfalls.

An explosion in the quantity of data available for analysis over the past century and the development of new tools with which to analyze it have been tremendous boons to a lot of policy debates where we no longer need to fly completely blind. But it all tends to cultivate an unhealthy impression that economics is a more precise "science" than it truly is. And I fear some economists are happy to play along with that because it boosts their perceived authority as public intellectuals.

What responses to the book have surprised you the most?

I'd expected response to the book would split along partisan lines. I came at the topic from a more free-market perspective than has been applied to a lot of intergenerational challenges up to now (as you'd expect for a Wall Street Journal editorial-page writer), and I had thought the main dividing line between who liked the book and who didn't like it would be along the left-right axis. Instead, I've been surprised by the extent to which the split is more along generational lines. Millennial readers from the political left might not agree with my policy prescriptions, but my description of the economic problems facing Millennials still rings true to them. Whereas Boomer conservatives push back hard on the message even though I'm part of their own political "tribe" on so many other issues. It's too easy for them to fall back on calling Millennials "snowflakes" and accusing us of whining, instead of recognizing that the economic challenges our generation faces are unique.