EconSpeak Redux
I’m glad to hear the choir is in favor of technical discourse over libatations. I posted the question after a seemingly harmless comment about enjoying the union of an academic lifestyle and a drunkard’s lifestyle was met with a stern reply that “Yeah… we need to be careful about making too many econ jokes.”
My feeling is that technical language is great when it aids communication, rather than hindering it. Among economics grad students it certainly seems more efficient to aspire to the union of two lifestyles than to say “I want to be a serious academic and I want to be a serious drunkard, but it’s not that I want to be both at all times, it’s that I want to enjoy each of them whenever I can, and if they happen to overlap occasionally, so be it.” On the other hand, a soliloquy on one’s monotonically increasing utility function for drinks seems unnecessary at best, particularly when not among The Econ. Among The Econ such things can certainly be said in jest, in which case one’s fellow Econ can probably be trusted to point out when one’s corniness has reached strictly diminishing returns.
Efficacy in communication seems like a good rule of thumb to extend from EconSpeak to any technical information. If you’re going to refer to a source outside of common knowledge you better explain what the hell you’re talking about.
Or, we can just continue with EconSpeak all the time. Maybe folks will be amused?
Of course, Ben’s point is more general. How much more pleasant would life be if people did not spend so much time complicating it with their language? Perhaps I say that because am I a neophyte, but I’d like to think that even if I were learned, simplicity would have its virtue nonetheless.