About

EconoFact is a non-partisan publication designed to bring key facts and incisive analysis to the national debate on economic and social policies. It is written by leading academic economists from across the country who belong to the EconoFact Network, and published by the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at The Fletcher School at Tufts University.

Mission

Our mission at EconoFact is to provide data, analysis and historical experience in a dispassionate manner. The presentation is in short memo form and written in everyday language, free of jargon, and where appropriate, accompanied by visuals illustrating the main point. We are committed to presenting even complex economic analysis in a way that is accessible to all.

Our guiding ethos is a belief that well meaning people emphasizing different values can arrive at different policy conclusions. However, if in the debate we as a society can’t agree on the relevant facts, then the nation itself loses a common base for constructive debate and policy will suffer.

EconoFact does not represent any partisan, personal or ideological point of view. The contributing economists are encouraged to present their own conclusions or policy recommendations at the end of their memos, but only after laying out the authoritative data and facts and stating the trade-offs that different choices entail. Our network of economists might disagree with each other on policy recommendations, but all will similarly rely on widely agreed upon facts in their analysis.

Value choices, in other words, come last, not first here. We all are being overwhelmed by a cacophony of voices online and off that cherry pick limited—and often false—facts to fit a point of view, instead of letting the data and the facts lead where they will.

In so doing, our goal is to contribute to the public debate through outreach to journalists, to those directly affecting policy in the corridors of Washington and in our state capitols, and to the public at large so that policies are well conceived and achieve desired aims. We see EconoFact as a resource for policymakers, thought leaders and journalists, on the one hand, and interested Americans, on the other.

Economists who are not members of the EconoFact Network are welcome to submit memos for consideration by an internal Network committee. To avoid trolling, we have not opened the posts to comments, but readers are encouraged to send comments to contact@econofact.org. We will curate them and post the most informative as part of our effort to contribute to the policy debate.

Executive Editors

Professor Michael Klein is the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He served as the Chief Economist in the Office of International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury from 2010-2011. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the IMF, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Federal Reserve Banks of New York, Boston, Dallas, and San Francisco.

 

Edward Schumacher-Matos is the director of the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at The Fletcher School at Tufts University and is a professor on media matters. He has been a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, a foreign correspondent at The New York Times, a columnist at The Washington Post, ombudsman at NPR and a member of a team to win a Pulitzer Prize at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has been the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia Journalism School and the Robert F. Kennedy Visiting Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. An expert on immigration economics, he is a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Institute. He was awarded a bronze star for merit in Vietnam.

Managing Editor

Miriam Wasserman is a writer and editor specializing in economics and public policy. She has been an editor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and her work has appeared in The Economist, Stanford News, The Chicago Tribune online, The Miami Herald, and El Tiempo (Colombia), among others.

Staff

The Econofact Network

Acknowledgments

In acknowledgment of their work and counsel in helping EconoFact move from concept to fruition: