The late Johnny Apple of The New York Times said in an interview last year that as a reporter he was “an amateur,” not an expert. Reporters who imagine they have become professionals in the field they write about, and that they can “teach lessons” to the experts, are making a big mistake, he said. “Your job is to represent your reader. Go and experience it, and try to explain it.”

At a time when the word “amateur” has acquired a pejorative flavor—as in amateurish—it’s worth putting in a good word for those who lack professional credentials but nonetheless love a subject—amateurs. They play an important role in society, especially in journalism. Reporters must continually learn new things, and it is when you have just learned something that you are best able to explain it. The expert, in contrast, is likely to have forgotten that most people don’t understand the basics, let alone the finer points. Often, he won’t see the need to explain things properly and may not be very good at it if he does.

Amateurs also play an essential role in the spread of ideas. For one thing, they are likely to be far bolder than experts. The great deformation of all professionals is the fear of being proven wrong; almost equally bad is the fear of having to admit ignorance. As a result, caution and obscurantism prevail among the pros. We find it all the time in the modern academy: statements so carefully hedged and qualified that they defy rebuttal and attract lit­tle attention. Given the opportunity—and huge infusions of government and alumni money make it possible—academic experts will isolate them­selves from external scrutiny. Their journals have become increasingly unintelligible.

Economics has no shortage of technicians who take refuge in mathematics. But unlike string theo­rists, say, or literary deconstructionists, economists must contend with the real world. They face compe­tition, too. Journalists are much involved in writing about markets, and often they lack specialized degrees. A famous editor of The Financial Times, Sir Gordon Newton, stopped hiring economics graduates after he learned the hard way that they were incapable of writing plainly.

A noteworthy intrusion into the professional bailiwick occurred with the rise of supply-side eco­nomics in the 1970s. True, the movement did sport a few professional economists, notably Arthur B. Laffer and Robert Mundell, but it owed its influence to the support of politicians and journalists, notably Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, Robert Bartley, Jude Wanniski, and George Gilder. All were generalists.

The stumbling block for professionals was the supply-side claim that the law of demand applied to government finances as well as private busi­ness. Lower the price of something, and more of it will be demanded. Lower the price of govern­ment—reflected in marginal tax rates—and more government will be “bought.” If the original price is high enough, revenues will increase as the tax rates are reduced.

A famous editor of The Financial Times, Sir Gordon Newton, stopped hiring economics graduates after he learned the hard way that they were incapable of writing plainly.

The pros were uncomfortable because they had not thought of government as an optional good—something we could take or leave. They assumed it was compulsory. But it is the high-income earners who are most affected by changes in top tax rates, and for them there are plenty of options, including leisure, offshore relocation, and tax loopholes. In addition, Keynesian theory, still dominant in the late 1970s, had assumed that tax rates and tax rev­enues rise or fall together.

The best professional reply to the supply-siders came in an offhand comment from Milton Friedman. If it is true that tax revenues increase in response to a reduction of tax rates, he said, that only shows the rates were not reduced enough.

George Bernard Shaw once made a brilliant foray into the world of the professionals. Like many oth­ers in the late 19th century, the playwright and journalist was fascinated by socialism and wrote a book about it, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Unlike most Marxists, however, he had actually studied Das Kapital.

Even before the third volume of Marx’s dreary but influential work was published, Shaw had identified a crucial error. In response to the claim that capital­ists expropriate the surplus value rightly belonging to the workers, Shaw commented that a rival capitalist, “trading on the same principle,” will “content himself with a [smaller] profit for the sake of attracting cus­tom [that is, sales].” The unjust surplus would soon be competed away. Capitalists were as much subject to each other’s competition as were the workers.

“The criticism received no reply,” wrote George Stigler, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and student of economic history.

No one paid any attention, and Marx went on and on. Shaw’s argument was right, but he had wrongly assumed that Marx appealed to reason. Marx was more mystagogue than logician, surely. His mumbo-jumbo effectively legitimized the seizure of power. The less intelligible his nostrums, the harder it was to repudiate them.

We could use more amateurs like Shaw today.

Here’s an amateur intrusion of my own. Recent discussions of inflation have often relied on an aquatic metaphor:

• The OECD reported that a “combination of oil-related consumer-price increases and capacity constraints…is expected to push up wage growth and spill over into core inflation.”
• An IMF report noted, “it will be important that recent fuel price increases not spill over into broader cost and price pressures.”
• The Council on Foreign Relations spoke of how “higher energy prices threaten to spill over onto the price of goods and services in general, thereby raising inflation risks.”(Emphases added.)

“Spillover” seems to envisage the oil price as contained within a glass sitting inside a larger ves­sel—the economy. The oil price goes up until it spills over. But this is just a metaphor, not reflecting the way things really work. Let’s say a commuter spends $30 a week on gas. Then the price doubles. Now he has to economize on other items, to the tune of $30 week. “Demand” for all of these non-oil goods declines, precisely off­setting the rise in the gas price.

Blaming inflation on price increases is like blam­ing heat waves on thermometers. Lurking here is a political agenda. It seems to be a way of imputing inflation to the perennial villains of our day, the oil companies, rather than to the accommodating cen­tral bankers who are really to blame.

But that’s just an amateur speaking.