About a year ago, Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore wrote
A strong core-periphery pattern has profound implications for the free exchange of ideas. Research interests, collaboration networks, and academic norms are often cemented during doctoral training. Thus, the centralized and highly connected positions of higher-prestige institutions enable substantial influence, via doctoral placement, over the research agendas, research communities, and departmental norms throughout a discipline . The close proximity of the core to the entire network implies that ideas originating in the high-prestige core, regardless of their merit, spread more easily throughout the discipline, whereas ideas originating from low-prestige institutions must filter through many more intermediaries. Reinforcing the association of centrality and insularity with higher prestige, we observe that 68 to 88% of faculty at the top 15% of units received their doctorate from within this group, and only 4 to 7% received their doctorate from below the top 25% of units.
The top graduate schools in any field form a tight club, into which it is nearly impossible to break in. This allows disciplines to easily be captured by fads, because the voices that would reveal the emperor’s nakedness are so completely marginalized.
In economics, I have argued that this phenomenon produced the spread of really silly approaches to macroeconomics, which is still a problem in the profession. This topic will be explored more in what I am calling The Book of Arnold.
I simply don’t expect “science” to be that practically useful. In that sense, occupying grad students with a bunch of math for example is actually success. I think the failure comes in when we mistake that useless math as having real-world value. All Chemical Engineers spend a B.S. year equivalent studying distillation columns. And none of them go into the world treating pumps and molds and whatever else they actually have to work with as if they were distillation columns. And if you ever see a lower case Greek delta again (unless you go to grad school) you’d be lucky (or unlucky!!!). Academic training is training for academia. Our hope is that there is some spillover. But it’s just a hope.
The Fed’s dominant role in research on monetary matters (See The Fed at 100) certainly reinforces a tendency to marginalize dissenters. Please hurry up with The Book of Arnold.
Go back and review Coase’s commentary on his disposition at U. Va.
Speaking of Econ fads, I remember the early 2000’s applied micro scene as the era of cute IV’s. The pied piper, of course, was Steve Leavitt. The message to grad students was find a clever IV, or a novel dataset (preferably both), then figure out what economic problem you can solve. Talk about getting it backwards.
It might be constructive to try to distinguish between fads from trends. Remember in biology when stem cells were the rage? Now it may be CRISPR. The possibilities with these kind of new roads kind of have to he exhausted. I would propose that as the trend. The fad is when various gatekeepers make those trends mandatory.
Most thesauruses say fad and trend are synonyms, so I don’t know how constructive it really is to split hairs between the terms. Especially on the internet.
To be clear, I’m not picking on IV as a methodology. I’m picking on the approach of finding cute/clever instruments paired with a unique dataset, then figuring out what econ problem you might answer.
The academic echosystem
I just give this gold away, smh.