hello real world

Killing EJMR

/ jdc / 2 Comments

For the last couple of weeks, the online economics community has been discussing and reacting to rampant misogyny on a website, Economics Job Market Rumors. A Justin Wolfers post to The Upshot at the New York Times reported on research by Alice Wu that laid bare the ugly, shocking language used to describe women on the website.

I recommend this post by Emily Eisner, Fiona Burlig and Aluma Dembo for a brief overview of recent research on gender inequality and discrimination in economics. Beatrice Cherrier’s post on the topic is rich and thoughtful.

The context of this discussion is that women are unacceptably underrepresented at all levels of the economics profession (source):

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Our profession, our work, and our image suffer from being male-dominated. EJMR is both a disease unto itself, and a symptom of a sick discipline.

Killing EJMR

One: the supply of bullying and bile on this anonymous forum must be stopped. A minimally moderated website dominated by lowest forms of vulgar misogyny cannot continue to be a significant institution in economics. And no, I do not want to hear it that EJMR is “just another” facet of tantrum-and-harassment masculinity on the internet. Don’t even say that. It makes you look like you are grasping for excuses.

Two: the sexist culture of the profession must be changed. Even if EJMR as it is now is mercifully destroyed, the rot is deeper. Smarter people than me have been fighting for women in economics for decades. We all must promote a culture that allows all people to succeed. This means confronting and shutting down “locker room talk” in any setting, including private conversation. It means reflecting on the structure of our institutions, from our classes to our schools to our professional associations, to promote diversity. It means mentoring women at all stages.

In no way am I looking to deflect from, minimize, or excuse these top, difficult priorities. I view this as an urgent crisis.

But three: I think, though, that there is one more thing we could all be more conscious of: what can we do better to reduce the demand for EJMR, or whatever comes next?

The EJMR website has been an open and significant part of the experience of graduate students in economics for many years. It is anonymous and extremely lightly moderated, and it is known for sourness, cruelty, and bullying. As with any online community, there is a core user base who either enjoy participating in the vulgarity or are willing to overlook it. However, the site is also widely used by young economists desperate for scraps of information on the gauntlet of the academic job market.

A narrative is emerging in which there is undeniable value to EJMR that helps to explain its persistence as an institution in the economics profession. It’s a place, this narrative goes, where valuable and mostly accurate information flows that young economists want.

Has a school called to schedule interviews yet? What type of candidate are they looking for? Has a job offer gone out? Who to? Are they going to take it?

What journal should I submit to? Why haven’t I heard about my submission yet? Is my dissertation idea garbage? What kind of research are people laughing at?

The academic job market is an intensely stressful experience. It is hard to surrender agency over where you would like to live and work, to navigate dual career concerns with partners, to fly around the country on a shoestring budget, to have one’s work and worth judged over and again, to compete against hundreds of other talented and deserving people, to fear the derailment of a career before it can even properly begin. It is overwhelming.

I want to reject the narrative that EJMR is an inevitable, valuable salve for the understandable neuroses of the young academic. I think that there are concrete steps that individuals and institutions in the economics profession can take to mitigate the need for something like EJMR, not just clean it up.

Superstars and insecurity

EJMR, like so much else in the profession, caters to the elite. Its tone is dominated by the concerns and perspective of the “top schools” and their students. It belittles “low ranked” students and schools. It devours the perceived weak and shrouds itself in the excuse of “the market”. Like a person who treats waitstaff as subhuman, it is a callous manifestation of the insecurity of the wannabe who feels that they must display their superiority by belittling others.

Of course people want to gossip about the “stars” of the market and to know where the “best” research is coming from. Page Six prints gossip about celebrities, not little people. Let us leave aside for a moment that “best” is located in a Catch-22 of “top school” path dependence. We could agree, maybe, that a little luck and a little path dependence do not undermine the achievements of the top economists. Excellence is rewarded. But that’s all a question for another day.

Here’s a funny thing, though. As Trevon Logan pointed out on Twitter, the imprimatur of Berkeley, Harvard, and the New York Times has helped to elevate this story to the attention of the profession at large.

 

EJMR itself could not distract the attention of the profession’s most powerful until it was graced with the formal attention of the elite. It is by the top schools, for the top schools, of the top schools. The vast majority of graduate students desperate for help and reassurance must go begging for scraps at a table of people who will mock them for their perceived shortcomings. It is vulgar in the extreme.

In this it is not alone. For example: there are many “guides” to the job market out there for graduate students. They include such concerns as how to politely turn down an interview when you simply cannot fit any more into your busy schedule. They are not helpful to a student who is ill with worry that their handful of interviews will not convert to a job, who will give a job talk to three people in a broken conference room rather than a shiny hall of power to a faculty of famous faces. The guides become useless and scary.

Edited to add (8/31/17): In my haste to make a case for reform, I made unfair generalizations about job market guides. In particular I was remiss not to acknowledge that John Cawley’s guide is one that has helped countless students over the years (myself included) and indeed addresses many of the concerns that I have raised in this post. This is an example of the kind of document that would be complemented by the kind of real-time and in-person information that I have suggested in my proposals would undermine EJMR. I apologize to John and to others like him who give up their time to provide information and advice on the job market process.

For example: insane paper turnaround times on submitted research favor the students of top schools. If each rejection takes most of a year—conservatively—and if you do not have elite mentorship and an elite network, mistakes will happen and be exceptionally costly. Here is the order in which you submit to journals, they say. They are survivors. They are there to advise you because they hit those journals. Their work is surely excellent, and they also managed to place it well. If you are a little less lucky, or a little less brilliant, where will their advice lead?

The profession has no mechanisms to help the average student.

Almost no graduate students can usefully call on the direct experience of the faculty around them. Each Ph.D.-granting institution hires fewer new faculty than it graduates. The bucket overflows. Students will do worse than their advisors. It is in this context that EJMR thrives. Students see how it is. They are desperate for help. They find it, poisoned by insecure hatefulness, in an anonymous forum that in a tragic twist of fate exhibits the very same elite bias that drove them to it in the first place.

What can we do?

1. Formalize interview information reporting through Job Openings for Economists

This is the most obvious way that the AEA can undercut EJMR. I appreciate that the incentive for schools to report when they have made calls or offered interviews is not clear cut. Too bad.

A more radical approach here would truly centralize interview offers on a clearinghouse schedule, but I accept that a centralized mechanism like this is not going to happen in economics.

2. Establish formal cross-school, cross-rank mentorship networks

Students need help and support that their own school’s faculty cannot adequately provide. We must have institutions that connect students with the economists that they will become, not the economists that they are shamed for being unlike.

This is probably awkward on both sides. No-one wants to admit that they are not a top dog. That means some bravery, humility, and discretion is required.

3. Formalize practical information on journal policies and characteristics

If we were starting with a blank slate, I would imagine most economists would have plenty of ideas for how to design research dissemination—submitting, refereeing, editing, publishing.

Given that we’re not starting over, we need a living database of relevant characteristics of as many journals as we can corral. Turnaround times, journal policies, fees, readership, citations, even the distribution of authors’ affiliations.

The Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession has an excellent document on navigating the research publication process. This provides a great template for the kind of concerns we need to address. The more concrete we can make the advice, the better.

Treat the disease

There are two traps here. One is that we succeed in reforming or replacing EJMR without having an impact on the sexist and racist culture of economics. There may even be a risk of backlash as that certain type of Internet Man resents being prevented from being hateful.

The other is that we achieve a minor miracle in affecting true, even if slight, change on a profession that is overdue for it, but that we miss an opportunity to implement complementary positive reforms.

We can take this opportunity to support young economists whose mental and physical wellbeing suffers under the pressures of our job market and early career concerns. A tiny fraction of graduating economists can choose their own adventure. The vast majority can hope, at best, to get a decent job in a decent place, to uproot their life and their family and their support network, again: to survive.

Let’s all commit to helping each other.

Loaded words and modeling

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Here is a nice review by Burton Malkiel of “Models Behaving Badly” by Emanuel Derman. The models of the title are from the world of finance: how are assets priced?

I am a layperson to the world of finance, so I find it difficult how to apportion “blame” for financial crises on faulty models or fraudulent inputs to them. Certainly history is littered with financial crises, so the influence of modern modeling alone cannot explain everything.

In any case, I just want to take this opportunity for a small lament that the beautiful act of modeling must be dragged through the mud by a financial crisis in this way. It would be fair to say that I am almost fanatical about the virtues of the concept and practice of modeling. I believe that modeling is inescapable. The world is complicated. Our senses deliver so much information, our mental apparatus must work so hard, that to process the world around us is to model. It is too much to ask that we understand everything; we have to understand a version of everything that is not so complex as the world.

This is also why economics works with models. We don’t have a scale replica of the world that we can play with to see how this affects that. We have to build a scale replica from scratch, using our best judgment to push insistently at the boundary between complexity (so that we can understand our model) and usefulness (so that we can make something from it).

In a way we are much luckier in economics than in finance. Progress in economic theory comes as our models are improved upon and refined, but we are more able to iterate forward because our models are not embedded in a Leviathan global finance industry that depends on their continued function. Creative destruction of old models is hard when the house comes down with them.

With all this in mind I want to highlight this passage from the review:

He sums up his key points about how to keep models from going bad by quoting excerpts from his “Financial Modeler’s Manifesto” (written with Paul Wilmott), a paper he published a couple of years ago. Among its admonitions: “I will always look over my shoulder and never forget that the model is not the world”; “I will not be overly impressed with mathematics”; “I will never sacrifice reality for elegance”; “I will not give the people who use my models false comfort about their accuracy”; “I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many beyond my apprehension.”

How many of these will I accept for economics? Certainly the first; the model is not reality. Certainly the second; math is helpful in model-building but is not the point of model-building. The fourth and fifth are hard to argue with.

The third I don’t like. Everything that we do must sacrifice reality. The test of a model is not its realism (a realistic model airplane would be no fun at all). All models are unrealistic because all models are wrong. Of course elegance is not the test of a model either, except that an elegant model is one that illuminates a relationship in a clear way by cutting to the heart of what matters.

Anyway, the point is that I think that “model” is not a dirty word. I feel possessive about “modeling” much the same way as I feel possessive about “rationality” – what they mean to me is important and wonderful and I hate to see them sullied by misrepresentation that stems from their overlap with the real-world ideas of modeling and rationality. I wish that all of the things like these could have their own words that are not borrowed from natural language.

Meta-ignorance

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The “how badly people do on civics and general knowledge test” sub-category of Cheap Journalism is always good for some light entertainment. But this recent example from Newsweek is especially delightful for the pontificating it inspires.

For more than two centuries, Americans have gotten away with not knowing much about the world around them. But times have changed—and they’ve changed in ways that make civic ignorance a big problem going forward. While isolationism is fine in an isolated society, we can no longer afford to mind our own business. What happens in China and India (or at a Japanese nuclear plant) affects the autoworker in Detroit; what happens in the statehouse and the White House affects the competition in China and India. Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead.

Goodness, where to begin!

Let’s start with the obvious. It’s always puzzling to see “competition” used with blithe disregard for what it means; why is it that competition is considered a lovely value at the level of the firm but a horror at the level of the country? Does a similar principle not apply? Of course decisions are interrelated and it is worthwhile to understand that interrelation, but the latent assumption seems to be that if we ain’t getting ahead we’re falling behind. It is not a fundamentalist opinion to demonstrate that the global economy is not a zero-sum game.
But that’s too close to real arguments for my taste. Let’s focus instead on

Before the Internet, brawn was enough; now the information economy demands brains instead.

This is a remarkably peculiar statement. To achieve more with a given set of resources requires innovation: once upon a time the only “production” humans achieved was to transform time and stone tools into dead animals and dinner. “Brains” have, of course, are irreplaceable in the process of achieving more. This is not abstract: the printing press, electricity, the loom, agriculture… we could populate this list ad infinitum. One entry on the list would be the Internet. The article is instead in a peculiar corner of arguing that brawn was enough to invent the Internet which immediately made brawn redundant.

Which is trivially nonsense. The “information economy”, whatever that may be, is not a revolution in the progress that pushes gently but tangibly at the constraint inherent in turning scarce resources into output that humans value. That process has never been the brute force of brawn.

More navel-gazing

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Since there are now, I estimate, more articles on the economics profession’s predictions/responses to the recession than there are atoms in the known universe, replying to them all would presumably take a very long time. One example will probably suffice. 

In the Financial Times yesterday, John Kay talks about “How economics lost sight of real world”. 
The past two years have not enhanced the reputation of economists. Mostly they failed to point out fundamental weaknesses of financial markets and did not foresee the crisis, and now they disagree on appropriate policies and on the likely future course of events.

As I have (almost) argued before, this is – for better or for worse – not in the job description of the vast majority of academic economists. It is precisely like attacking a physics professor because there was a blackout last night. More importantly:
Economists, like physicists, have been searching for a theory of everything. If there were to be such an economic theory, there is really only one candidate, based on extreme rationality and market efficiency…. a few deranged practitioners of the project believe that their theory really does account for all human behaviour, and that concepts such as goodness, beauty and truth are sloppy sociological constructs.

I have addressed the “economists don’t feel feelings” argument before. And, by the way, I guess you can color me deranged. Economics is a theory of everything! 
First: the assumption of “rationality” that is central to economic theory is a modeling assumption and makes no restriction on behavior whatsoever. The auxiliary assumptions of what people care about – the things that they “rationally” try to achieve with their limited resources – are restrictive. Second: “market efficiency” is neither a theory or a modeling assumption. It is either a metric (one of many) by which we can evaluate outcomes (i.e. is this “efficient”?) or a result of an economic theory, which, like all economic theories, will probably require many assumptions. 
I would agree with the proposition that it is wrong to assume that markets are “efficient” (and what does that even mean?). Economists do not make such an assumption. I would agree with the proposition that it is wrong to assume that people care only about their own material wellbeing. Economists do not make such an assumption.
Academic economists did not predict this recession because that is not what academic economists are “supposed” to do with their time. 

Eternal students

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Just in time to miss the question of economics as vocation versus learning for its own sake comes this article from BBC News. “French students shy of the real world”, it says, and the message is that France is a mess because French students are intellectually curious. Perhaps I paraphrase slightly.

France may be a global leader in high technology, but employers complain that today there are far too few students studying science and technology and there are far too many studying “soft subjects” which leaves them ill-prepared to join the real world of work.

I asked a passing student what he wanted to do when he left university. “I want to be an eternal student, ” he said. “Just learning for learning’s sake.”

Fair enough, that might not get a great deal done in the scheme of things, but what a great sentiment. We are, after all, talking about a rich country here. Some young people will surely become scientists and engineers, if that’s what they want. Some other young people will find that a “soft subject” (?) will be the one that stimulates them to want to know and to learn. The luxury afforded to the people who do not struggle to find food to eat or a place to live is to indulge in pursuits like these. We can afford to foster excellence in knowledge and learning, whatever form it may take.

Or we could start a state-run forced labor program.

“But with such poor economic growth and such huge public debt, this country now needs its clever young students to leave the university campus and start ploughing their skills and enthusiasms into the profitable world of work.”

Chills. Why not just set up labor camps and get it over with? Who said anything about “growth” or “profitable”? Didn’t the student just tell you he wants to simply learn? Was it not once the case that universities and learning were valued on their own merits? Can the technical and vocational not coexist with the abstract? I know there exist some non-technical careers out there for which the key requirement is “intelligent”. As an employer, maybe I need scientists, but maybe I need people who are bright and creative and literate.

As I argued yesterday, there are particular implications for a field like economics which is torn between feeling itself purely vocational and purely not. This French debate then mirrors the tension at the heart of the teaching of economics; can it not be OK to pursue this field because it’s interesting?

Then it’s bizarre that it feels like many students take economics courses not because they enjoy them or because they are vocational. Perhaps economics just looks good, perhaps even because it’s confused with finance or business. Perhaps we, the educators, are complicit in the charade because it brings high enrollments and money. There is no incentive to change the program, even if the core is rotten. It’s like an asset bubble – the value of economics as a major, the value of economics to a university, to economics departments, goes up and up and up, but at the bottom there is nothing.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there is something down there. But if it’s not intellectual curiosity, a desire to know, then what is it?

Visiting the real world

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Economists don’t spend a great deal of time in the real world. We’re especially bad at having arguments, which is strange, considering that we have an infinitely flexible method and a bunch of unanswerable normative questions.

Unfortunately we’re all adrift on the ocean of economic science. The work that researchers do generates the kind of tedious methodological debates that help seminar audiences catch up on their sleep, but it doesn’t generate actual ideological debate: perhaps that’s the biggest possible endorsement of positivism in economics, but we didn’t need to lose it.

I always liked the Oxford Review of Economic Policy; it’s one of the few examples of a true economic policy journal, which means that while it’s still a bit dry, it’s non-technical and, more to the point, actually talks about real stuff. For example, this issue from last year is a survey of what’s going on with pensions – not exactly riveting, but if you’re into that kind of thing, an invaluable look at how economic science can inform ideological debate on pension reform. This one does much the same for growth and development in India.

The saddest misconception about positivism in economics is that we must sweep out all normative debate in order to be “scientific”. Yes, we have to avoid ideological prejudice when we research what’s actually going on, but doesn’t it seem like we’re building a fancy machine and never turning it on? Our “scientific” results don’t change the fact that our economic models don’t provide any “answers” to the great normative questions of what we should be doing.

It all must be especially boring for the poor undergraduates who are the cannon fodder of scientific economics. They get the distilled versions of some of our scientific methods and modeling – without, mind, necessarily finding out about their flexibility – but don’t get any practice in using economic analysis to engage in real policy debate. Perhaps it’s another casualty of the loss of the essay in economics; perhaps that comes from our huge enrollments, victims of our own success.

Just because positive economic modeling is supposed to separate itself from ideology, it doesn’t mean that economists should. Perhaps if we argued a bit more, we’d bring some life back to our discipline.