Progressives are likely facing a long time in the wilderness when it comes to the Supreme Court. Beyond the anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-voter decisions already laid down over the past decade or so, we can anticipate a conservative majority for many years to come. But watching and waiting is no strategy at all. What can we do?
economists are people too
Kindness in the economics profession
I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.
Economics Twitter spent some of the past week reacting to a new paper reporting survey results on how economists evaluate peers’ publication lists. Here’s a description of the results from the authors:
I’m not here to stop anyone from evaluating publication lists however they see fit. There have definitely been some snotty responses on Twitter that of course this is the right way to judge the publications of others, and that wouldn’t it be good if other disciplines did the same. I find that a little tactless and bratty, but fair enough. If you feel like you want a mechanism to sort your peers and you feel like this is the right one, knock yourself out. Maybe be a little more tactful about it, but okay.
Another class of response has been much gentler: not all strands of research pan out or are super groundbreaking, but they may still be worth publishing somewhere rather than being trashed. This is arguing against the attitude in the survey and against the kind of incentives those attitudes might generate. In a similar spirit lots of folks have been making good sport out of pointing out examples of ultra-influential papers outside of the “top” journals.
These seem a lot kinder in spirit than the “yeah, so?”, but they still make me a bit uncomfortable. The problem here isn’t merely that some not-so-brilliant research is buried or that some not-immediately-influential research upends the conclusion. To my ears the problem here is the erasure of vast numbers of hard-working economists.
The majority of professional economists don’t publish regularly or at all in “top” journals. There are countless reasons why some economists may not be willing or able to conduct research that will be accepted there. And being willing and able is in any case not enough to guarantee that it will happen. (For one thing, let’s recall another paper that had Economics Twitter buzzing recently on the importance of social ties in the publication process.)
Are the people who happily brag about their distaste for research outside of “top” journals ignorant or cruel? I take for granted that they do not consider someone a true colleague if they are not “good enough”, but what I do not easily understand is whether they don’t comprehend what they are implying or if they don’t care.
Pages in “top” journals are finite and the number of Ph.D. economists grows. How can you ask for nothing but “top” publications and sustain the industry as it is now? You cannot. If economists whose job requires research output refuse to publish outside of the “top” journals, they will lose their jobs. If instead they continue to publish outside of the “top” journals, then not one of their colleagues should treat them unkindly for it. Naturally there is a role for systems to identify great, broadly interesting research, and naturally such a system tends towards elitism, with all the pros and cons that implies. But it needn’t be toxic.
Once again: I’m not the thought police, and it is your right to look down on others if you want. But my advice, if you want it, is to shut up about it. I’ve argued before that economics is structurally not very good at supporting the average economist, and this is another manifestation of that.
If all economists who were not willing, not able, or not lucky enough to place research in a “top” journal were to leave the profession, what would you have? The graduate students you rely on, the citations you covet, the undergraduate enrollments you are enriched by, and the textbook royalties you enjoy would disappear with them. May you get what you wish for.
Rehabilitating the economist
Following up on my post Methodology, Ideology from a few days ago, I’ve started to dig in to Johanna Bockman’s Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism. It is a fascinating perspective on the history of economic thought and the sociology of economics. Importantly, it is explicitly concerned with separating the standard methodology of neoclassical economics from right-wing, capitalist ideology.
I have suffered from an unshakeable paranoia about being an economist ever since it looked like I was going to become one. To be an economist is, as I have written about a lot before, to be generally understood as someone concerned with finance, business, and money, a soulless being who sees human beings as automatons programmed to maximize their wealth. I began to feel—I still can’t shake the feeling—that we are forever condemned to this tragic, villainous role.
Leech the economy
Anatole Kaletsky’s evisceration of “old economics” in the London Times may be consistent with the general backlash during the current recession, but it’s half-baked.
Today’s academic approach prevented economists from thinking about a world that is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inconsistent… others may revive the literary and anecdotal traditions of the great economists of the past… Smith and Hayek produced no real mathematical models. Their eloquent writing lacked the “analytical rigour” demanded by modern economics. And none of them ever produced an econometric forecast.
To wish simultaneously for a return to an “anecdotal tradition” and for theories to be “tested against reality” is perverse. The economy is indeed a complex system, and to draw correct conclusions on the relationships in a complex system requires more than anecdote. As epidemiology is to medicine, so econometrics is to economics; a
patient’s recovery after leeching does not prove leeching effective, and folk inference in economics would be just as counterproductive, in its own way. The “analytical rigour” so disdained by Mr. Kaletsky represents the struggle to understand and draw inference from the very real complexity that to rely on anecdote risks ignoring.
The first idea, known as “rational expectations”, maintained that capitalist economies with competitive labour markets do not need stabilising by governments.
The second idea — “efficient markets” — asserted that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way, reflecting all the best available information and forecasts about the future.
The specific “theories” attacked by Mr. Kaletsky are also grossly misrepresented. Hell, the concept of a theory is being misrepresented. An economic theory is an if-then statement, and this is not a matter of mathematics, which is after all just a language like any other. No theory, no matter how it is expressed, can ever do more than suggest the outcome that would pertain under a given set of conditions. No theory, then, can “[maintain] that capitalist economies… do not need stabilizing by governments”, or “[assert] that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way”. To attack the assumptions underlying these theories is good and rigorous; to either attack the value of their existence is to distort the purpose of academic inquiry. It is precisely because
theories are if-then that any single conclusion can be given an ‘if’ and be co-opted and championed by the politically powerful of the moment, but the “assertions” come always from the interpreter, not from the theorem.
theories are if-then that any single conclusion can be given an ‘if’ and be co-opted and championed by the politically powerful of the moment, but the “assertions” come always from the interpreter, not from the theorem.
Literary and cross-disciplinary approaches to economics can have great value in conveying economic ideas and in complementing other forms of research. What would be unacceptable, however, would be the abandonment of valuable tools to help us to understand the way things are. Perhaps attacking economists makes us feel better, but this is like blaming the shipbuilder, engineer or mathematician for a drunk captain’s crash.
And finally, because that felt a bit too serious, I must mention these:
Today’s academic economics reverses this process: if models disagree with reality, it is reality that economists want to change.
Policymakers who turned to academic economists for guidance in last year’s crisis were told in effect: “The situation you are dealing with is impossible: our theories prove that it simply cannot exist.”
This is garbage.
Economist versus economist
This mostly innocuous entry at the Freakonomics blog is comparing the rejection of offers in the ultimatum game (where I propose a division of some money, you either accept or reject, we get the money if you accept but don’t if you reject, and then we go home) to the rejection of the ‘bailout’ of the financial sector. It raised my ire with this:
Many economists cannot understand why they’d do such a thing. To an economist, an offer of even 1 percent would be worth accepting since it is free money, and because for the second player it is ultimately irrelevant how much money the first player takes home.
But most people do not think like economists. When offered 10 percent or 20 percent or even 30 percent of the total, they are disgusted by the inequity — and willing to pay the price for that disgust by rejecting the offer.
Show me a scrap of evidence that “many economists cannot understand why they’d do such a thing.” Pardon my language, but that’s bullshit. Really, what the hell. In fact, it’s so infuriatingly ridiculous that I’m going to be forced to actually say something as clearly and calmly as I can, but I’m going to have to do it in boldface:
Economists are capable of feeling things.
Phew. No, seriously, the quotation claims that:
- Economists don’t understand that people care about things.
- Economists don’t feel feelings.
- Economists do not conduct life in the same way as people who actually care about things.
Give me a break.
Jim Campbell 