I confess to harboring snobbish feelings about having studied economics. Not that my training was especially advanced; before embarking on a career in journalism, I took several economics courses in college, which I supplemented with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. But compared with many of my fellow reporters, editors, and competitors who had little or no academic background in the subject, I couldn't help feeling that I was significantly better equipped to understand economic issues than they. Curmudgeonly as this may sound, when I come across economic or financial journalism that strikes me as shoddy—in news articles, op-ed columns, or books—I sometimes check the author's credentials, almost invariably finding that, for all their talent at glib writing, their fields of concentration at university were subjects such as English literature or “mass communications.” Teeth-gnashing ensues.
Examples abound in news coverage and commentary about cryptocurrency. Prior to...
