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Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information. The recent popularity of machine learning in the f

by mizzao 11y ago

Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information. The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare exception. Economists only cite other economists. One of my colleagues put it this way: if you write a paper that is interesting to economists, and an economist finds it and does some follow-up work, that paper will get all the citations from economists.

bachmeier 11y ago
> Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information. I disagree. Economists pull in work from many other fields: statistics, math, computer science, political science, sociology. Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD in economics. > The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare exception. Not really. Economists were applying neural networks in the 1990's, just as one example. The problem is that these ideas often fizzle out because they weren't designed for economic data and it turns out that they don't provide much value. > Economists only cite other economists. That's the real issue. The field of economics is very closed. It's even worse than you describe. Not only do you have to cite papers written by economists, you have to cite the right economists, or the referees will stop reading and write a negative report. Getting new approaches into economics is easy if you have connnections within the editorial process that rejects more than 90% of submissions.
- mizzao 11y ago
  > Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD in economics. I don't know about that--it was really a chore to christen the field of behavioral economics, previously considered to be "psychology".
evanpw 11y ago
My favorite example of this kind of thing (from medicine): someone re-discovers the trapezoidal rule for integration, names the technique after themselves, publishes in a Diabetes journal, and gets hundreds of citations [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_claiming_to_have_invented_a_way_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_...

by mizzao 11y ago

bachmeier 11y ago

> Economics is a highly inbred field, which makes it very difficult to transmit cross-disciplinary information. I disagree. Economists pull in work from many other fields: statistics, math, computer science, political science, sociology. Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD in economics. > The recent popularity of machine learning in the field might be a rare exception. Not really. Economists were applying neural networks in the 1990's, just as one example. The problem is that these ideas often fizzle out because they weren't designed for economic data and it turns out that they don't provide much value. > Economists only cite other economists. That's the real issue. The field of economics is very closed. It's even worse than you describe. Not only do you have to cite papers written by economists, you have to cite the right economists, or the referees will stop reading and write a negative report. Getting new approaches into economics is easy if you have connnections within the editorial process that rejects more than 90% of submissions.

mizzao 11y ago
> Kahneman and Granger are recent Nobel Prize winners that didn't have a PhD in economics. I don't know about that--it was really a chore to christen the field of behavioral economics, previously considered to be "psychology".

evanpw 11y ago

My favorite example of this kind of thing (from medicine): someone re-discovers the trapezoidal rule for integration, names the technique after themselves, publishes in a Diabetes journal, and gets hundreds of citations [1]. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_claiming_to_have_invented_a_way_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_...