7 ms·

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.

cma 6y ago
You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.
- HugeAcumen 6y ago
  Not as much as I'd distrust the advice of the squeeziest.
thephyber 6y ago
> The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer. Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I think it's meant to be read as, "rich, powerful, and totally undeserving of influence."
roenxi 6y ago
The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.
- leto_ii 6y ago
  > a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-faire etc. The exact opposite of government control over industry. > no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies for example This is (probably) true, but the reasons are again quite simple and don't involve the state very much. Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible. Since academic economists are often beholden to big capital owners (in one way or another), they will of course promote theories that justify and encourage concentration of ownership, not its dispersal among the workers. > it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. I would say most economists consider it at best "heterodox" and often either don't know much about it or strongly disagree with it.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.
    - leto_ii 6y ago
      Hmm, interesting. Do you have a few references from let's say top five journals that incorporate MMT descriptive aspects? I'm genuinely curious.
    - atq2119 6y ago
apengwin 6y ago
Isn't M.I.T. traditionally the powerhouse school in Economics?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
robust 6y ago
Can you point to evidence that the top 5 (to which I would add MIT and Berkeley) get a larger share of citations in economics than in other disciplines?
- bjonnh 6y ago
  I could find one source here with such a ranking (didn't dig in their method though): https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.nbcites.html https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.nbcites.html
bachmeier 6y ago
You must be thinking of the top 5 journals. At the places with money, top 5 publications are the only thing anyone cares about. That's not the entire profession by any means - only those in the highest-ranked departments. The vast majority of papers I read and cite were not published in the top 5 journals. As someone else pointed out, MIT is one of the top 5 departments, while Yale is generally not considered to be in that group. The list of departments with Nobel Prize winners shows that there are plenty of good departments: Harvard, MIT, NYU, Yale, Chicago, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, Northwestern, Berkeley, Minnesota, Columbia, Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, San Diego, Arizona...that's just in recent years.
xondono 6y ago
I would argue that the results from the now infamous “Replication crisis” point otherwise.

cma 6y ago

You'd sort of have to distrust the ability of any economist who wasn't good at squeezing the most out of a compensation system.

HugeAcumen 6y ago
Not as much as I'd distrust the advice of the squeeziest.

thephyber 6y ago

> The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer. Was that sentence necessary? There are so many conspiracy theories about Epstein that its not clear what you are expressing here and I'm not sure I care to know.

whatshisface 6y ago
I think it's meant to be read as, "rich, powerful, and totally undeserving of influence."

roenxi 6y ago

The incentives are also out of alignment - politicians have an enormous incentive to promote economic theories that let them pork barrel to constituents. And a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry. Major financial players have incentives to push theories that favour wealth accumulation to big players. I note with some cynicism that there has been no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies, for example. I suspect pervasive co-op style businesses combined with a reasonably permissive lending environment would be absolute economic powerhouses. That sort of research no doubt happens, but it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory.

leto_ii 6y ago
> a slight incentive to favour theories that increase government control of industry I think you have this the wrong way around. Mainstream economic theory (the neo-liberal kind) actually leads to the control of government by private capital. What you will see coming out of the top schools (especially Chicago) but many others too is theory that pushes for de-regulation, privatization, free flow of capital, laissez-faire etc. The exact opposite of government control over industry. > no apparent push by economists to promote workers as primary owners of companies for example This is (probably) true, but the reasons are again quite simple and don't involve the state very much. Great concentrations of wealth are built and maintained by keeping capital ownership in as few hands as possible. Since academic economists are often beholden to big capital owners (in one way or another), they will of course promote theories that justify and encourage concentration of ownership, not its dispersal among the workers. > it gets no airplay compared to people pushing branches of Keynesianism or Modern Monetary Theory MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. I would say most economists consider it at best "heterodox" and often either don't know much about it or strongly disagree with it.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > MMT especially is not at all a mainstream theory. AFAICT, the descriptive aspects of MMT are widely accepted, if deemphasized in prescriptive contexts, aspects of mainstream economic theory (not just [neo-]Keynesian, but across essentially the whole spectrum of descriptive economics.) The prescriptions that MMT adherents make based on those descriptive aspects are out of line with mainstream prescriptions, which tend to honor what MMT loudly points out (and mainstream economics more quietly acknowledges) is the fiction of the finite public purse.
  - leto_ii 6y ago
    Hmm, interesting. Do you have a few references from let's say top five journals that incorporate MMT descriptive aspects? I'm genuinely curious.
  - atq2119 6y ago

apengwin 6y ago

Isn't M.I.T. traditionally the powerhouse school in Economics?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

robust 6y ago

Can you point to evidence that the top 5 (to which I would add MIT and Berkeley) get a larger share of citations in economics than in other disciplines?

bjonnh 6y ago
I could find one source here with such a ranking (didn't dig in their method though): https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.nbcites.html https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.inst.nbcites.html

bachmeier 6y ago

You must be thinking of the top 5 journals. At the places with money, top 5 publications are the only thing anyone cares about. That's not the entire profession by any means - only those in the highest-ranked departments. The vast majority of papers I read and cite were not published in the top 5 journals. As someone else pointed out, MIT is one of the top 5 departments, while Yale is generally not considered to be in that group. The list of departments with Nobel Prize winners shows that there are plenty of good departments: Harvard, MIT, NYU, Yale, Chicago, Princeton, UCLA, Stanford, Northwestern, Berkeley, Minnesota, Columbia, Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, San Diego, Arizona...that's just in recent years.

xondono 6y ago

I would argue that the results from the now infamous “Replication crisis” point otherwise.