Most financial journalists have never worked in a business role. This often shows in their reporting. In reading (and watching) news, I regularly say to myself “I wouldn’t have reported it like that” or “why didn’t they look at it this other way?” In 2019 I finally decided, instead of complaining privately, to air my ideas publicly.
My qualifications to be such a critic? I’m a hybrid journalist and business guy. I spent some years as an editor for American business magazines.1 Along the way I also became an amateur investment analyst. Then I switched careers and became a marketing manager in b2b2 companies. I plied that trade at several large U.S. corporations whose names you would recognize. Also I took a few turns in the tech start-up scene — unfortunately at companies whose names you wouldn’t recognize, and which largely have faded from the scene!
So now I return to my first passion of writing, with the intent of sharing, in this blog and maybe elsewhere, business insights gained via that real-world experience. In addition, I believe my business life also afforded me some broader insights about the economy, of both USA and the world, that I will share over time. You will be judge as to whether these ideas truly qualify as insights.
In the real world, economics merges into politics. So what of my politics? Am I liberal, conservative, something else? Yes to all the above.
You will find both right- and left-wing political views3 in my commentaries. For example, with regard to U.S. politics, I support school vouchers (conservative); single-payer health care (liberal); legalizing narcotics (libertarian), and carbon taxes (every economist on the planet, but seemingly nobody else). So good luck trying to pigeonhole me!
In this blog’s name, the adjective “occasional” in front of “economist” is meant in part to convey the idea that I do not claim to be an economist in the academic sense.4 For more about this point, please see the article Who is an economist?
D. Howitt
New Jersey, USA
email: editor at occasionaleconomist dot com
P.S. I currently do not use Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. I’m not opposed to doing so, but the problem is, they make me dizzy! Thank you for any links to this blog that you post on those sites or elsewhere.
Notes
- Including Inc. Magazine and InfoWorld; and co-authored a book about business research.
- “Business-to-business”: companies that sell products or services to other businesses, not to consumers.
- Also see Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State by Ralph Nader.
- For the record, my academic credentials are: B.A. economics, University of California, Santa Cruz; M.A.L.D., Tufts University.