Economics nowadays is very slow, careful, and methodical. Because professors have limited time to read, we reward one’s greatest, most pain-staking single work. The institution of the job market paper is a reasonable response to this – you will spend perhaps seven years, start to finish, working on one single paper, adding bells and whistles to show one’s ability. You start it in your second year, have a six year phd, and have it eventually publish two years into your first job. By the time it comes out, it will be thoroughly out-of-date, though of course immaculate.
The world for economists is changing. The development of generative artificial intelligence will, in my view, completely shake up how economists conduct their research. I do not think the old way will be best, although I am not sanguine to say that it cannot last. (Many bad equilibrium have lasted far beyond their proper time!). Economists are going to be able to move much faster when it comes time to actually write the paper. We are going to exhaust what can be done with the data we already have – it will not be that hard to sic an AI agent on a dataset to tell you everything you might possibly be interested in.
I would like to propose a vision of what that future may be. You may have already heard of the economist as engineer and the economist as plumber; I would like the economist as reporter. The economist should be someone who goes out into the world, gets the facts on what we can and should change to make the world better, and then builds a case for why we should do this.
...read more at nicholasdecker.substack.com
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Insider perspective here.
I think there is a balance that needs to be struck. I think currently, the publishing process is way too slow. It's true that papers will be 4-5 years out of date by the time they're published. The benefit of this approach is that the work is usually quite solid. The downside is that it's out of date, and moreover the solidity of social sciences is questionable to begin with. So why all the effort at rigor if the very subject matter is difficult to pin down and constantly shifting?
So because of that, I favor the "economist as reporter" paradigm.
However, there is a danger to that as well. If relevance and timeliness matter more than academic rigor, then the incentives are to move too fast. Sensationalism or ideological usefulness trump accuracy and nuance. This is what we've seen from mainstream news reporters.
How does the author of this piece propose that we avoid sensationalism and ideological capture in this "economist as reporter" model?
Also, the idea that economists should "present a case to building a better world" is highly suspect. "Better world" by whose definition, after all?
I still remember the graduate student who showed that exposure to immigrants makes people less anti-immigrant, thus we should randomly spread out immigrants in rural towns
There used to be lots of lengthy back-and-forths amongst economists. Maybe that’s the solution to sensationalism and other problems of moving too fast: ie we start treating publications as part of an ongoing discussion rather than definitive analyses.
We used to joke in grad school about how the naive first regression, that takes about two minutes, ends up being basically right most of the time. That suggests a lot of value in high-speed economic “reporting”.
I'm currently working on a paper that took us 1 year to get the first draft out, and it's been stuck in the review process for 1.5 years. Despite all the different things the referee made us do, the central results have not changed at all.
I agree that a faster public back-and-forth is the model we should move to. GitHub is a good tool for this. That's one of the reasons why I was excited to do the Research in Public series. All the work is actually public if anyone should want to engage with it (though it lacks any visibility right now for anyone to do so.)
I’m imagining one person doing a quick first pass and publishing right away.
Then, instead of anonymous reviewers pointing out concerns, another researcher actually updates the work with those changes and publishes their results.
And so on.
the way editors of journals and magazines USED TO WORK. Fantastic
Mmm, since I've been in academia (14 years or so) I don't think it's ever worked that way.
I meant way back, before peer review. Like when the greats were running the journals, like 1910 or whatever
That was before the kinds of work I'm thinking about even existed.
I don't think so. When I say quick pass, I'm not saying it should be sloppy, just that the first author would do the immediately obvious stuff and write that up. The write up would still be high quality.
The subsequent authors would add the next levels of analysis that take up most of the time and usually only serve to increase confidence in the result.
Yes, I like that idea.