Welcome to the wonderful world of economics blogging, Ben Bernanke! The former Federal Reserve chairman rolled out a blog and a Twitter account Monday morning, promising to engage more publicly on a range of economic issues, and occasionally on baseball.  It’s a welcome development. Mr. Bernanke has the advantage of a long and productive academic career combined with a decade spent at the highest levels of government. So he brings a richer perspective than almost anyone else to the most important economic debates of our time. And he’s quite a nice writer, as is evident in some of the more personal speeches from his chairmanship (I like this Princeton commencement speech best).  But as those of us who write about economics on the Internet can attest, it’s not always easy figuring out what to write about. And while Mr. Bernanke may know more about many things than the rest of us, getting attention, and traffic, for economics writing on the web isn’t among them. So here are some ideas to get him started.  Does inequality matter? There has been a deepening consensus, particularly since publication of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital” last year, that rising inequality of income and wealth is an important trend over the last two or three decades across the advanced world.  Other work has argued that this phenomenon is holding back the overall economy, as the wealthy save more than middle- and lower-income families. And regardless of whether you buy that idea, there is a moral argument that an economy failing to generate income gains for the bottom 95 percent of the population isn’t an economy that’s working very well.  It’s easy to forget, given that he presided over a period of interventionist policy by the Fed, but Mr. Bernanke is a Republican, and subscribes to a traditional center-right skepticism of the desirability of government intervention to try to correct perceived problems in the economy. But how have events of the last decade influenced his thinking on this crucial question of whether the government should do more to combat inequality?  Mr. Bernanke tended to avoid taking a position on these questions as Fed chairman, viewing them as being outside his purview and more the stuff of partisan debates. As an outsider, now’s the time for him to chime in.  What about the robots? One of the most interesting debates to capture the attention of economics bloggers in the last few years concerns the possible effects of robotics and other rapidly improving information technology on wages and employment in the decades ahead.  Are the people who worry about a dystopian future in which most of us have no real prospects for earning an income onto something, or is it more like bemoaning what the invention of the personal computer will do to the typewriter industry?  In the past, Mr. Bernanke has tended toward techno-optimism, looking at the great advances in technology as a way to improve human welfare and make workers more productive (with higher incomes), rather than squeezing them out of work entirely.  Savings glut, redux. A decade ago, Mr. Bernanke coined the term “global savings glut” as a possible explanation for low long-term interest rates in the United States and elsewhere. In effect, there were more savers looking for a place to safely park cash than there were places to put it.  He backed off that idea a bit in an interview with The New York Times last year, arguing that a lack of good investment opportunities could be as much a culprit as excess savings. In other words, the reason for rates being so low then — and lower now — has less to do with the oversupply of savings and more with relatively low demand for it from companies and households that want to spend.  This is closely related to the “secular stagnation” debate that was kicked off in recent years by another former high-ranked economic policy maker, Larry Summers. It should be prime blogging territory for Mr. Bernanke, who has been thinking about these issues in great depth for much of his adult life.  Lessons from the Fed. The Federal Reserve occupies a unique place within the government, exercising vast power but with a carefully guarded independence from partisan politics. Mr. Bernanke may have been appointed by President George W. Bush and reappointed by President Obama, but he didn’t answer to them.  On one hand, this structure has created a high-performing, technocratic organization that employs some of the smartest people in government. On the other, it creates doubts about its legitimacy in a democratic society, particularly during the 2008 crisis when the Fed was choosing how to deploy hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer resources.  What, then, are the lessons for American government? Should Congress be outsourcing more of its decision-making to independent technocrats? Or could the lawmaking process be reformed to keep decision-making in the hands of elected officials, but with better outcomes?  Mr. Bernanke has seen the economic policy sausage made up close. Time to explain how we could get tastier sausages.  The Washington Nationals: What are they doing right and wrong? Mr. Bernanke is an avid Nats fan and has previously sung the praises of the former manager Davey Johnson in print (in an assessment that, if you squint, doubles as a metaphor for the type of central banker Mr. Bernanke aimed to be).  So let’s hear it, Mr. Chairman. Was this year’s mega-contract for the ace pitcher Max Scherzer a good move on a team already loaded with great pitchers? Is the team foolish or wise not to lock in two excellent players with soon-to-expire contracts, shortstop Ian Desmond and pitcher Jordan Zimmermann, to expensive long-term deals?  On one hand, with baseball, unlike economic policy, Mr. Bernanke is just one more fan, albeit one who is uncommonly good at math. But that can be liberating! The chairman can offer his unbridled opinions about the Nats in a way he probably never will about monetary policy.
Inequality, robots, secular stagnation and the role of the Federal Reserve are all topics we’d love to know his thoughts on. Also, baseball.