Category: Economics Profession

Boycotts are all around us

There has been quite a bit of talk lately about boycotts, in the academic world, in the foreign policy world, and in the consumer world.

Academics are signing on in rather large numbers to a boycott of the journal publisher Elsevier, for practices they view as stifling to creative and innovative thought, and access. The original call to boycott is here, the Chronicle article is here, and if you Google the thing, you’ll find dozens of blogs and articles talking about it. It doesn’t seem to have hit economists too hard yet, but I imagine it’s going that way.

In foreign policy, all the talk is about boycotting oil from Iran in order to ensure that they don’t get the bomb.

Finally comes the Apple boycott, rocking the consumer world. The NYT came out with a an article last week exposing exploitation of workers and unsafe working conditions in China by Apple. Combined with the conflict minerals stuff, some people are hoping to end their iAddictions. Others, of course, want to point out that the whole thing is ridiculous.

Of these, Iran is definitely the silliest. Oil is a fungible commodity. If we don’t buy it from Iran, we have to get it from someone else, say Norway. Thus, another country who formerly bought from Norway, will now buy it from Iran. Iran will sell it to someone else, perhaps at slightly higher transportation costs, but they still will sell it. (Update: Off the wire blog goes into this in a bit more detail here.)

I’m not entirely sure what to make of the Elsevier boycott. I am all for voting with my dollars, and my time, but I guess this feels big because it is inextricably linked to my profession and my sense of self. As graduate students, we are shown over and over again that the path to success is publish, publish, publish, get tenure, and be satisfied. But I can’t help but think that all of this is changing. It’s like the rug is being pulled out from underneath me. It’s not the end of the world surely, but I’m not sure what an open-access academic content world is going to look like. I’m sure that functionally, it won’t change much for most people. But for academics, it’s likely to change a lot. And that’s scary on some level, even if it’s also exciting and desirable.

I’m going to mull over my thoughts on the Apple boycott a bit more, but they certainly seem to be all around us, don’t they?

Update on Fun Wednesday Reading: I’m in the midst of Innes, Rob. “A Theory of Consumer Boycotts Under Symmetric Information and Imperfect Competition.” The Economic Journal, 116 (April) 355-381.

h/t @mflbellemare

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Crowd-sourcing classroom blogging

So, I’ve made some work for myself this semester, I think. In light of the conversation a few weeks ago regarding blogging by academics, and a recent spate of blog posts on LSEImpact on social media, I decided that my students should be blogging.

In reality, I think they should be writing. A lot. And I think they should be reading each other’s writing. It’s amazing to me how many students go through college having had no one read their papers or other written work except their professors. Don’t get me wrong, I have faith in the ability of most professors to present an informed opinion on a work, but those students are missing significant opportunities to improve their skills of crafting an argument if they do not practice and put themselves out there. I can give an opinion on how to write something, but it’s merely one opinion.

It’s a good one, of course, but just one.

So, I have 25 students in two methods classes. They are going to blog about their research projects–still TBD for most, though a few have come to me with interesting ideas. They are going to blog about their reading assignments–mostly from Poor Economics or Freakonomics. Hopefully, they also blog about questions that come up in their textbooks. Hopefully, they blog about interesting things they find in the news. Hopefully, they start reading other blogs and commenting on them as well.

The course blog is here. It has three lists of links. One for each section of my class and one for several economics blogs. Some I read, some were just suggested to me. If your blog is not on there, and you think it should be, let me know. I’m happy to add it. I think the more examples they have, the better.

In addition, I’m totally open to ideas of how to make this work. Assignments that are particularly well-suited to blogging (with an economics or econometrics or research component preferred) are totally welcome. If it worked or if it didn’t, it it was an unmitigated disaster or a resounding success, I’d love to hear about it.

Fads and RCTs and the job market

I spoke with a colleague last week whose university is hiring in Development this year. I was surprised, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, that of six candidates they are flying out, five have job market papers using Randomized Control Trials. Maybe that’s an area that their department is trying to fill and thus that’s the kind of faculty they are interviewing, but it seemed odd along with a comment from another job market candidate.

A friend on the market, in development, told me that she felt she was having a hard time selling herself as a development economist. Without an RCT (and the requisite cash that accompanies these very-expensive projects), she didn’t feel like she was getting even enough attention to get a job. Her plan is to find a new line of research using US data in the next year to go on as a Labor economist.

I realize these are two very specific examples and might not be indicative of the market as a whole, but I do think that fads in economics are both fascinating and problematic. No single theoretical or empirical response to data issues is a panacea, and I wonder if we are putting too much stock in RCTs–and thus in those who were lucky enough or prescient enough–to get into them early. There’s still a lot of value in survey data, I think, and I hope we don’t lose those important results because of a love affair with RCTs.

MLK Day and Race

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, as I’m sure you know. MLK Day was the only federal holiday we got off at Duke, or at least the only one that fell during the semester. It was always marked with a big celebration and my dance group often performed. I always liked that celebration.

But I’ve gotten totally off-topic. An article this week in the NYT highlighted the issue of choosing a race, particularly on census forms, for Latinos in the US. Latinos, who are incredibly diverse in physiognomy and heritage, are, according to the article, choosing to mark ‘other’ instead of one or more of the categories provided.

The issue is of particular importance to economists because in most microeconomic work, we control for race. The implication of this, of course, is that by including someone’s race in a regression, we are separating out some aspect that is predictive of whatever behavior or outcome we’d like measure. And not only are we separating it out, we’re separating it out in a measured, specific way such that we think it applies to all respondents.

For example, we might see a regression that says, all other things equal, the average black person receives one more year of education than a white person. (I saw a statistic like this the other day, saying that black people of similar wealth and socio-economic status get more education than their white peers, I wish I could remember where it came from.) Though the statement is necessarily couched with “on average”, if a number of people are choosing other instead of white or black or some combination of these, we’re not actually seeing the true average. This is called measurement error, and can have pretty significant effects on esimation.

In my own work, for instance, black mothers and white mothers in the Fragile Families Data display different characteristics and decisions regarding investments in children when controlling for whether they’ve received a promise of financial support. But if I were able to capture more of the group that self-identifies their race as other, this effect may be reduced or even disappear.

The question of whether to even ask about race, or ethnicity, is a sticky one. It may give us information that gives different groups more “clout” as the NYT article argues, or it may reinforce stereotypes and feed the flames. Regardless, if research continues the way it currently goes, having a large group of people opt out because they don’t find something that fits them is problematic.

There’s still lots of thinking to be done about it, and perhaps today is a good day to mull it over a bit. I hope you enjoy your MLK Day!

–“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” -MLK, Jr.

Blogging

There was a bit of discussion last week on the internet on blogging by academics. Particularly for economists, blogging is a relatively new venture and as there is as yet little demonstrated value in the academic job market, it’s a source of debate.

When I decided to start this blog, I started from a much different place than many other economics bloggers. I was still in the midst of writing my dissertation and my advisors were fairly adamant that I not blog. One pointed me to an economics blogger who had just left her university without tenure and with plenty of speculation that her blogging had contributed to that. She also left with a book deal. Call it what you will, but they were worried that blogging would be seen as taking time from serious academic work and would hurt my own chances for tenure and promotion down the line. One even tried to give me a number. Each blog post a week over a year was equivalent to one academic paper, or something like that.

That’s such an economist way to look at things, isn’t it?

Beyond my less-than-junior status, I’ve been blogging for a really long time. Since my first stint in Venezuela in 2003, I’ve kept a personal blog that I used to keep in touch with family and friends. I started that blog to try to stay sane while working as a journalist in Caracas and to make notes for a book project on Venezuelan women. One post, that was reprinted in my former editor’s blog and the Duke economics department bulletin (Oeconophile), is here. It’s over eight years old now. As that blog became more and more personal in nature, it also began to reflect my dual need to write about economics and about my own experiences with graduate school. In my move to a real job, it seemed to make sense to separate the economics-type posts from the personal ones, to use my writing about economics to create a public persona, a space just for economics. I could use it as a tool for organizing research, planning classes, and sharing my thoughts about what was going on in the world. The old one is still active (and private), though the number of posts I write there is lower now as the total is about split between here and there.

I don’t think that blogging is for everyone. I realize that most people are not compelled to write in the way that I am. Most people don’t have the habit of sharing their daily lives and musings–regardless of the topic–with a potentially large, unknown audience. Twitter is changing that, but the format is quite different.

I fully realize that this blog might hurt my chances at tenure, if and when I come to that point. I really hope that it doesn’t, though. I hope that the tenure process expands to include digital scholarship and outreach.

Even in my limited use of this blog and Twitter, I’ve made contacts with other researchers I likely never would have found otherwise. I’m grateful for this and hope that it continues, that it expands into greater opportunities for collaboration, discussion, and more. This blog might lead to other things. It might not.

But old habits die hard, and I can’t imagine not doing it, so here I go.

Dissertation

There is a large debate in the economics community about the value of putting out working papers. When a working paper creates significant buzz, whether in the media, on twitter, or even just among economists, the conclusions in the paper take hold. That first impression is shown to be very persistent, even when a later version of the paper comes up with opposite results.

At least as long as I’ve had this blog, I’ve had a note on my research page saying that links to working papers are forthcoming. I’ve completed my dissertation and am working on revising the chapters to submit to journals. I’m fairly certain that the big picture of these papers isn’t going to change and my advisors were insistent that each of my chapters was very close to that point. Consequently, revisions are small at this point, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t benefit from a little help from the internets.

Over the next few weeks, I will post each of the chapters of my dissertation here. Comments, suggestions, typos, criticism, etc. are welcome.

Stay awhile

I got a first-hand look at the economy of Europe this past week with a trip to Ireland. The pessimism was rather unsurprising all around, but I got my first exposure to it before I’d even entered the country. I told the the customs officer that I was a professor and he replied “And what do you usually profess?” It took me a minute to realize what he was asking, but I replied “economics”. Without looking up at me, he handed me my passport and said, “Stay awhile. You’ll learn a lot.”

On the state of economics

I haven’t yet written much about the Nobel Prize this week. There was little discussion of it within my department, likely due to a dearth of macroeconomists and a few days off for “reading days”. I will try to write something more in depth about it, perhaps over the weekend, but I found this piece, by John Kay, rather insightful for several reasons, two of which I’ll highlight here.

The first has to do with teaching. Students often struggle with the concept of a model. It’s something that is so profoundly simple, and even simplistic, that they struggle to see the use of it. I really like Kay’s description of the necessity of simplifying assumptions

All science uses unrealistic simplifying assumptions.  Physicists describe motion on frictionless plains, gravity in a world without air resistance.  Not because anyone believes that the world is frictionless and airless, but because it is too difficult to study everything at once.  A simplifying model eliminates confounding factors and focuses on a particular issue of interest.  To put such models to practical use, you must be willing to bring back the excluded factors.  You will probably find that this modification will be important for some problems, and not others – air resistance makes a big difference to a falling feather but not to a falling cannonball.

At lunch today with my chair, we discussed the decline in female economics majors. Our department, unlike many economics departments, has quite a few female faculty members. I didn’t have a single female economics professor at Duke, though I did in my time abroad. In fact, the female economics faculty with whom I did interact at Duke left a not-fantastic impression. At least anecdotally, I can say that high female-to-male faculty ratios didn’t push me down my current path, or low ones didn’t discourage me, either. Rather, Kay suggests there is something about the nature of our model-making that is profoundly asocial and disconnected, and thus, perhaps, male.

The knowledge that every problem has an answer, even and perhaps especially if that answer may be difficult to find, meets a deeply felt human need.  For that reason, many people become obsessive about artificial worlds, such as computer games, in which they can see the connection between actions and outcomes. Many economists who pursue these approaches are similarly asocial.  It is probably no accident that economics is by far the most male of the social sciences.

The whole piece is incredibly well done and provides a clear, straightforward critique of economics today; it is a bit dense. It addresses much of the debate behind current arguments for and against deficit spending, which, sadly, are likely not well understood by those pushing for either side. I highly recommend reading it.

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