Moreover, it remains hard to open people’s eyes to the stupidity of much empirical economics, because the econometrics treadmill is useful as a make-work and credentialing program for tenure seekers.Job applications masquerading as science. On the fucking dot.
“Publishing” is really the wrong word for what journals do in the age of SSRN. They certify work, for a fee, the return on which may consist in a “peer-reviewed” publication leading to tenure.
If journals are sometimes as boring to read as a stack of resumes, that’s because they largely serve the same function. Job applications masquerade as science because perverse customs make original scholarship—however trivial, wrong, and/or unread that scholarship may be. That’s the price of admission to a career explaining demand, supply, and market equilibrium to undergraduates.
What do you do when the emperor has no clothes? Other people need to step up and provide leadership. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment sprang not from established universities, but from gentleman soldiers and courtiers and statesmen, popular writers and clergymen, bohemians and sponges, who boldly called themselves philosophers and lived up to the name. Today, similarly, economics’ best hopes lie in uncredentialed economists from business, journalism, and government, abetted by academic mavericks.
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The current icon shows Polistra using a Personal Equation Machine.