I passed on listening to this podcast with Russ Roberts last week, but Russ insisted that the paper is important, and I have come around to agree. Zingales concludes,
The purpose of this article is to highlight the parallelism between the forces that we use to explain regulatory capture and the ones that can capture economists. Unless we economists are made of a different fabric of the regulators, I do not see why we should not be subjected to the same kind of pressures.
Based on the analysis of these forces, I discuss several mechanisms to can help prevent (or reduce the effects of) capture: from a reform of the publication process, to an enhanced data disclosure, from a stronger theoretical foundation to a mechanism of peer pressure. Ultimately, the most important remedy, however, is awareness of the problem, an awareness most economists still do not have.
Read the whole paper. I thought that Zingales’ proposed remedies were too much on the clever and cute side. A couple of examples
Social handicaps make a person less suitable to an industry job, reducing the value of what business has to offer down the line and thus reducing a possible channel of capture.
If authors can post rejection letters, they can embarrass the editors when they make mistakes, especially when these mistakes seem to be driven by outside interests.
The conventional wisdom is that issues of professional ethics revolve around who pays you to do research. But money is not necessarily the driving force in economists’ capture. To borrow an expression from Roberts’ new book on Adam Smith, economists will respond to those who make them feel lovely. So if your paper with a statistically significant result gets published and your paper with a statistically ambiguous result does not, you stop submitting papers with ambiguous results. If the one-sided, uncharitable opinion pieces that you write get widely circulated and praised, then you stop writing charitable, balanced pieces. If the unreliable study that gets a result that is so exciting or pleasing that the press picks up on it, then you stop worrying about whether your results are reliable.
Although Zingales is correct to stress that it is vital for economists to be aware of the issue of capture, I would go further in the direction of deep cultural change, as opposed to clever incentives or procedural tweaks. I think that the challenge is to make feeling lovely align with intellectual honesty, as opposed to just getting articles accepted at journals or being a popular opinion-writer. That in turn requires thinking about, agreeing about, and caring about what it means to be intellectually honest.
My thoughts (these ideas may overlap):
1. Fight against confirmation bias. Work very hard to convince yourself that you may be wrong, and work less hard to convince yourself that you are right. When you come across a paper that goes against your views, look for its strong points. When you come across a paper that aligns with your prior views, look for its weak points. (I think that failure to uphold this standard accounts for a lot of the degeneration of academic journals. More generally, it contributes to the tend toward conformity and unreliable research findings rather than open intellectual inquiry and genuine progress.)
2. Resist the temptation to write in ways that work to persuade those with whom you agree to keep their minds closed. Instead, seek to open their minds to possible problems with their ideas.
3. In the political realm, try to pass Bryan Caplan’s ideological Turing Test. State the other side’s case in a way that they would mistake you for being one of them.
4. Be charitable to those with whom you disagree. Try to engage their strongest arguments rather than harping on their weakest arguments.
5. Steer clear of asymmetric insight. That is, do not claim to understand your opponents better than they understand themselves.
6. In particular, steer clear of reductionism. Rather than trying to explain away other’s beliefs, assume that others have arrived at their views on the basis of reason.
Fantastic.
Thanks for this excellent post. I find it almost unbearably painful to follow your advice consistently, even though I am convinced that you are right. I suppose, these inner barriers are a huge part of the problem.
Thumbs up for your 6 points – all of course easier said than done, but worth the effort.
Those guidelines are widely applicable outside of economics papers.
Our discourse would be so much more interesting and enjoyable if we could manage to abide by even just a couple of them (at a time.)
I need to practice those.
This is very good, and it would be excellent if this admirable advice were followed. Raising a generation of scholars who had internalized these principles would make the world a better place. But an exogenous outbreak of intellectual morality is unlikely. But let us not despair, but think like economists. Assuming as we do that people respond to incentives, how would you structure the incentives in research and publication to push people toward adopting these norms?
Arnold:
“I would go further in the direction of deep cultural change, as opposed to clever incentives or procedural tweaks. I think that the challenge is to make feeling lovely align with intellectual honesty”
Michael:
“Raising a generation of scholars who had internalized these principles would make the world a better place. But an exogenous outbreak of intellectual morality is unlikely.”
Maybe “honesty” and “morality” are the wrong type of words to use – they’re trying too hard to convince, and they’re not appealing to our selfish side.
Instead, we could strive to make curiosity and a “zen”-like even-handedness be one or both of
a) fashionable, cool, high-status
b) overwhelmingly useful
For example, how much did the A/B testing of websites spread because people became more intellectually honest, vs because cool, successful companies had already done it?
If you are gonna go the high-minded route, maybe it could be more aspirational – “teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea” rather than “God wants you to build an ark”