In his 1946 classic Economics In One Lesson, Henry Hazlitt explained that the “art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” Although Hazlitt had no academic background in economics (in fact, he didn’t finish college), his deep understanding of its “art” was rivaled by few academic economists of his era. He secured his legacy by not just mastering the subject, but also by explaining it in a clear and accessible way to an educated lay audience. H.L. Mencken wrote that he was “one of the few economists in human history who could really write.”

Unfortunately, as economist and historian Gary North explained recently, that kind of Hazlittian clarity is severely lacking in academic circles. According to North, many university economists today are mere “technicians” and “specialists in non-communication”:

They may have published an article in some obscure academic journal. They have no influence in the economics profession. But they know all about some technical detail. They have spent their lives majoring in minors. They are still writing narrow monographs at age 50, because that is what is safe professionally.

North is highly critical of economists’ lack of communication skills and their willingness to “compromise” with the “academic guild.” “They are after tenure, which means they will never have to work hard again in order to receive above-market salaries,” he writes.

For North, the shining example of how young scholars should model their careers comes from Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), the Austrian School economist and anarcho-capitalist theorist whose treatises and articles have influenced my thinking and thousands of others interested in free markets, liberty, and justice:

He wrote with enormous clarity from the very beginning. There is no one else like him in the history of the economics profession. Nobody else wrote that clearly – not even Hazlitt, who was not cursed with a college education. Rothbard wrote clearly, and he wrote until the day he died. He cranked it out, and it was always worth reading.