interesting. Influence of live economists (proxied by google trends) over time. A short exploratory 🧵.

Paul Krugman is at 5% of Oct 2008, and 30% of pre-2008.

Joseph Stiglitz: about 20% of pre-2010

Steven Levitt. "Freakonomics" came out in 2005. Since then, down 90%. Slight improvement after his podcast launched.

Doron Acemoglu: interest spiked at Nobel's time and receded. An economist's economist, not a public intellectual.

Yanis Varoufakis. Kind of an economist, kind of not. Peaked during his memorable tenure as a finance minister. Down 95% since then. But slight uptick recently.

Tyler Cowen. First peak during the financial crisis, pretty stable since then. Book releases are transient peaks.

For comparison, let's include an outsider public intellectual: Taleb. Not peaky, like Cowen, with relative peaks at the GFC and book releases.

Here is a comparison on the same scale of the top 5. Despite his decay, Paul Krugman still seems the most searched economist-public intellectual. NTT less so, but similar. Everyone else, not even close. Overall, is a negative trend in influence in the sample.

Shiller and Rajan, the only academics who warned about the upcoming crisis (permabears like Roubini don’t count), are sadly not even on the map.