The session in which I took part at the 2011 American Economic Association annual meeting was about Popular Economics, chaired by Peter Dougherty of Princeton University Press and with Robert Frank, Steven Levitt and Robert Shiller as my co-panellists.

I'm sure they will each write about their own views (Bob Shiller will be posting a column for Project Syndicate) so I'll just sum up their remarks briefly. Professor Shiller kicked off by discussing the rather negative view many academic economists would take of books reaching out to the wider public. Writing accessible books doesn't help any academic's career, and some economists would anyway regard it as improper to air in public opinions not yet vetted by the process of peer review and professional scrutiny. But he disagreed, arguing that economics as a social science properly requires a debate between the profession and the public.

Robert Frank followed, arguing that he sees economists as having a duty to try to educate and influence the wider debate, perhaps especially on controversial issues such as deficit reduction. He gave the example of making the case for infrastructure spending even when the government budget has to be cut,  explaining to the wider audience (including politicians) the distinction between spending on capital and current account of the government budget.

In my remarks I made two points. The first is that there is a 'paradox of popularity' – economics books have become more and more popular with the general readership at a time when the standing of the profession is low, with economists getting at least our fair share (maybe more) of the blame for the crisis. There seem to me to be two explanations. One is that the most popular economics books are the ones that seem to 'disprove' economics, or rather, what people take economics to be about. That would include for example anything about behavioural economics or 'happiness'. I'd also include Freakonomics and similar books, because to many readers they seem to be not really about economics at all and therefore much more interesting. A second explanation for the paradox is that people still want to understand what's happening in the world in such tumultuous times, and will read the economics even if they have some degree of distrust of economists,

My second theme was that this doesn't matter anyway as long as a wider audience is reading more economics. The reason is that implementing public policies that are broadly sensible and don't fall victim to some daft headline or bandwagon is truly difficult, so anything that improves the public understanding of economics is welcome. Daniel Bell predicted in 1976, in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, that the main faultline in modern politics would be between technical advice in circumstances of great complexity and difficulty and the populism of modern democracies. He was right, but it's much worse than he thought because we have hyper-populism with constant media and online dynamics. Just as there is now a chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University (held currently by Marcus du Sautoy) we really need one for the Public Understanding of Economics. Although of course the quid pro quo is that economists have to be humbler about the limits of our own understanding.

The final speaker was Steve Levitt (his co-author Steven Dubner was in the audience too). He made two very interesting points. One, that economists learn from the public, and as social scientists we need to understand them as much as the other way around. Secondly, that the reach of Freakonomics and its spin-offs (radio, movie, blog…) is that he can now generate data sets from the public.

I'm not sure we convinced all the audience, which consisted mainly of academic economists. While some comments were in sympathy with the panel, others seemed to consider popularisation as a side-show compared to the serious business of research. But I think more economics professors are now doing more to engage with the public, and that can only be a good thing.