impassioned pleas

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.

Rehabilitating the economist

/ jdc / 1 Comment

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.

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Who should pay for higher education?

/ jdc / 3 Comments

the_simpsons_homer_goes_to_college

Details might change, but the really big question in higher education funding is always the same: public funding versus private funding. I’m not breaking any new ground here and I’m certainly not advocating anything radical, but it’s on my mind today with “debt-free college” very much in the discussion on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. Every so often I like to refresh my memory on the fundamentals and reaffirm why, on balance, I favor the availability of ambitious, quality, zero-tuition higher education.

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Economics versus sociology: economic imperialism again

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The BBC, or at least Alan Connor in the Magazine, is of the opinion that economics is thieving turf from sociology:

There’s actually nothing new in explaining how people decide or why people believe – it’s called sociology. But if your boss wouldn’t want to be caught with a sociology book in their luggage, there is now a range of delicious bite-sized chunks in books with titles like The Undercover Economist, The Rogue Economist and The Hidden Side Of Everything. Economics – once academia’s dry “dismal science” – has decided to get tough.

The article’s talking about some of the hot books, books from that sublimely irritating ‘big idea’ genre, that might be making waves among whoever reads them. At very least we know that they haven’t learned the true history of the phrase ‘dismal science‘; more importantly, is the economics/sociology charge justified?

The question of economic imperialism is a familiar one, and I think one that comes from the supreme flexibility of economic modeling to be applied – for better or worse – to things that are pretty far away from what ‘economics’ is perceived to be. The gulf separating what economics is ‘supposed’ to be about from what its method can be used for is wide, and in it we can find the charge that economics is stealing from all over the place.

I wonder if the Connor quotation couldn’t equally well read “it’s called psychology”, anyway. The kind of back-to-basics positivist modeling economists do these days naturally blurs the boundaries between disciplines that, maybe, were only ever separated by their topic of interest rather than their idealized toolbox for investigating those topics.

One of the titles specifically mentioned in the article is “Nudge” by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein; I haven’t read the book, but I am irked by the Magazine article’s summary of it. See if you can guess why:

The Buzzwords:

Econs (people that are perfectly rational but sadly imaginary)

The libertarian paternalism ideas are sometimes quite neat, the idea being that freedom of choice can be maintained but the framework of the choice changed – the famous example being requiring opt-out instead of opt-in to increase enrollment in pension funds – but, of course, even the brains behind something like that shouldn’t be claiming to have proved irrationality. Just use a different word! Please! Mechanical or something, maybe?

Classifying economics: humanity or science?

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How should the discipline of economics be classified within academia – does it belong to the arts, sciences, social sciences, humanities? A wonderful article called ‘The Burden of the Humanities‘ by Wilfred McClay in the Wilson Quarterly got me thinking about that this morning.

Even if we go by something so simple as what degrees are offered in departments of economics there doesn’t seem to be much consensus. While the Bachelor of Arts remains perhaps the most common undergraduate degree in economics, the Bachelor of Science isn’t unheard of; indeed, the London School of Economics, one of the most recognizable schools for the subject, awards the BSc. At Oxford University, the undergraduate degree is the BA, but at postgraduate level the MSc – is this a good reflection of the journey up the hill of science, math and statistics that we economists make on the course of our study? If so, why do so many North American universities – NYU, Yale, Brown, Toronto, etc etc – award the MA as a postgraduate degree (albeit in the US usually as a consolation prize for those abandoning the PhD)? What about something like Economics and Finance? Is that more BSc-ish than just economics?

Do we belong to the humanities or to science? This question is obviously closely tied to the ethos of economics teaching, especially the positivist teaching method and the quantification of the discipline. If your economics education focuses on the political, moral, philosophical, historical, intellectual parts of economics, it sounds more like the humanities. If it focuses on the mathematical, statistical, empirical, experimental, computational parts, it sounds more like science, or at the very least, ‘social’ science. Maybe since there’s no ‘standard’ blend of these two categories in an economics degree it’s right that we don’t know which degree is more appropriate; all I know is that the scientific categories are much, much more prevalent in the content of US undergraduate economics education than the humanities categories.

McClay’s essay talks about the defining characteristics of humanities, borrowing first from the National Endowment for the Humanities definition which allows the humanities to include, among other things:

“those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods…”

This would seem to allow economics into the party, since it is closely concerned with human behavior, especially microeconomics which is obsessed with how people make choices and decisions. Or is it? Historically, macroeconomics has often relied on a characterization of a country as a big machine, to ask how, for example, exchange rates interact with interest rates, or whatever. There has to be a human element buried somewhere, unlike in the natural sciences, but it’s not the focus. McClay addresses just this point:

“But this can be stated more directly. The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.”

You could plausibly argue that the history of economic thought has been a reduction of the human to something else; this is valuable because it allows us to abstract from the uncertain world of how people behave into a place where we might be able to draw plausible, tangible conclusions, but just as it’s taken the discipline into a place of backlash where ‘behavioral economics’ wants to recover a keen interest in the way humans operate, it might have carried away much claim we had to be part of the humanities. Of course this also implies that a bunch of the psychological-type economics that’s so very popular at the moment might arguably be ‘humanities’, but that probably overstates the case, since psychology itself isn’t usually considered as such.

McClay argues further about the tendency towards science and away from the humanities:

“For many Americans… [the humanities go] against the grain. After all, we like to think of ourselves as a practical people. We don’t spend our lives chasing fluffy abstractions. We don’t dwell on the past. We ask ­hard headed questions such as Where does that get you? How can you solve this problem? What’s the payoff? If you’re so smart, we demand, why aren’t you rich?”

There’s a strong similarity between this line of argument and the tendency towards science within economics itself, and perhaps all the same questions apply there. If I imagine arguing that we should have more normative content in economics courses, I immediately imagine being challenged, ‘where does that get you?’, ‘what’s the payoff?’. Plus, as a nice bonus, ‘why aren’t you rich?’ could, in another context, be a very pithy summation of the boneheadedness of economists towards the normative metrics of happiness or success.

The weird paradox, however, is that, to this eye, the practical value of the majority of economics research is very difficult to find; I know science for its own sake is still science, pushing the bounds of knowledge etc etc, and I know the charge can be leveled at any subject, but still, for better or worse, ‘what’s the payoff?’ is a question we could rightfully ask in response to any claim of economics to be a science.

And what do we lose when we drop the humanistic from economics? McClay says:

“For you can’t really appreciate the statuary of our ­country—­our political and social and economic ­institutions—­or know the value of American liberty and prosperity, or intelligently assess America’s virtues and vices against the standard of human history and human possibility, unless you pay the price of learning the ­stories.”

This is certainly true of the abandonment of economic history and the history of economic thought as fields of study in so many departments of economics. If we can argue for economics as science or as humanity, why have we dropped all humanistic study of it? Won’t we lose the ‘stories’, the lessons of the past, the normative context, the ability to critically evaluate the scientific results that we might be able to squeak out of our modeling and empirical analysis?

Finally, McClay ends discussing the role of the humanities in contributing to the attainment of ‘happiness’ or satisfaction in life.

“…the lure of a pleasure-swaddled posthumanity may be the particular form of that temptation to which the Western liberal democracies of the 21st century are especially prone.

One of those things left behind may, ironically, be happiness itself, since the very possibility of human happiness is inseparable from the struggles and sufferings and displacements experienced by our restless, complex, and incomplete human natures. Our tradition teaches that very lesson in a hundred texts and a thousand ways, for those who have been shown how to see and hear it.”

In the context of the study of economics, can’t we make a similar argument? It’s not just that economics may have contributed heavily to the ‘happiness as goal’ business, or to the wedding of income, GDP and money to ‘wellbeing’; By abandoning the humanistic in the teaching of our subject, don’t we neglect to show the next generation how to see and hear the humanistic as it relates to the organization of our economies, our world? Economics is not a technocracy. We need to understand its humanistic foundations if we are to wield its tools and arguments as experts.