5 ms·

Coming from public health, but being involved in several economics hires, economics is fucking savage when it comes to presentations.

• majormajor 4y ago
  That is a bit strange since it seems our economic models are ... extremely rough, at best.
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    Our economics models are second to none. (cuz it's hard to predict the economic future of the entire human race)
    • dmichulke 4y ago
      Yes, they are the best, but are they good?
  • hnaccount_rng 4y ago
    But that is quite normal, isn't it? The (perceived) need to put other people down ultimately stems from uncertainty about ones own work. And having only bad models available makes it incredibly challenging to think of your own work as "obviously worthwhile", making it more important to improve your own standing by putting down others.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• dash2 4y ago
  Former polisci PhD, now in an economics department. I’m gonna offer a qualified defence of the savagery. 1. Social science matters. If we predict inflation wrong, or mistake what causes development, we screw up the world. (Hello Gunnar Myrdal.) Therefore, if there’s a tradeoff between a nice atmosphere and getting things right, we should always prefer getting things right. 2. There is a rightness-maximizing level of savagery, which is strictly positive. Bad ideas must be challenged. Sometimes bad ideas get entrenched. Then they must be challenged loudly and persistently. Fields where this doesn’t happen tend to degenerate into back-scratching cliques. (Hello, humanities.) Now clearly there is some level of savagery which is TOO savage. If you destroy a PhD student’s confidence, that’s hurtful and you’ve lost their future contributions. Aggression from the top can be used to defend entrenched but mistaken ideas. And there’s certainly toxic behaviour in economics. I’ve seen it and experienced it! 3. Nevertheless, overall, econ does better at removing bad ideas than other social sciences. Our models can be critiqued… other soc scis often just have verbal models which are too vague to be wrong! Our focus on good research design to uncover causality is stronger than many other fields, also. Lastly: 4. There’s more than one kind of toxicity. There are many stories of bad abuses of power - eg sexual harassment - in supposedly “warm”, and highly feminist, fields like Eng Lit. Doubtless there are many reasons for any differences between fields. But I think one underestimated factor is that when there’s no ruthless, hard-faced empirical rigour, when theories are vague and evidence is narrative, then getting published comes to depend on academic politics - on alliances and cliques. That is a fertile breeding ground for abuse of power.
  • eigenrobot 4y ago
    I should be clear that I mostly favor the savagery with the caveats you mention, and look back on it with fondness. God made Econ brownbags to train the faithful.
  • Fomite 4y ago
    Honestly, I wasn't particularly impressed with the rigor of said savagery - it mostly came off as a combination of senior people wanting to flatter their own ego and accepted rudeness. I've been completely dismantled in a presentation before, and public health has fairly high stakes as well, but I let people finish their sentence first. The number of interruptions that were then addressed with "That's on the next slide" was staggering.
    • dash2 4y ago
      I think it varies. I've seen "savagery" that was rigorous challenge, and savagery that was arrogant and unhelpful.