The recent Arday affair has led a lot of people to claim that academia is “rotten” or “broken” or “coasting on past glories”. This is inaccurate. Academia is doing just fine. When people assert this, they are both badly misunderstanding what makes academia good, and they are unfamiliar with the work that academia presently produces.
For starters, academia is not really one thing, any more than Black people or Hungarians are. There are somewhere on the order of 15 million people involved in instruction around the world. The failure of some part of it does not make the whole rotten, because they are scarcely connected to each other. The Arday affair is an indication that the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge have low standards and do not produce useful work. We should also be skeptical of those journals which published him and work like his, and we should be skeptical of those departments which have similar opinions as to good scholarship as the Faculty of Education. But does the poor quality of his work have any bearing on the good work that is done elsewhere in the university?
I do not think so. I am only an expert on my corner of the world, economics. I will not attempt to evaluate the other departments. But I am extremely confident that economics is in a very good state. It’s the best it has ever been. People are producing work answering important questions with great data and the best possible methods with enormous practical consequences for public policy and individual action. This includes his colleagues at the University of Cambridge – I would highlight in particular the work of Florin Bilbiie, and of Vasco Carvalho.
That is all that academia need produce. What matters is the very best work, not the average. The costs of bad work are the taxes needed to pay them, and pulling the person out of whatever other line of work they would have done. (You’ll note that this indicates the harm of Arday was really rather small). Something which is of poor quality is read by no one and influences no one. Something which answers a good question well can introduce a new technology, or change public policy, potentially creating millions or billions of dollars in value.
Even within disciplines, it is fine to hire mediocrities. People do not necessarily know their quality going into a program. If they turn out to be a lemon, then faculty hiring down the ladder is insurance. It’s all part of paying for breakthroughs, and if paying for bad work is part of a system which produces great work on the whole, then it is worth paying.
If education departments are bad, it is not because they produce bad work, but because they produce no good work. I do think this is true, because they choose to use methods which have no chance even in principle of creating an advancement of the public’s knowledge. Sociology is the same way. To the extent that they are able to advance the knowledge of the public, it is when they embrace hypothesis testing and empirical falsification.
I certainly agree that Arday should have been fired, that it was wrong to protect him, that threatening critics with libel lawsuits is wrong (and a problem with Britain in general), that the Faculty of Education is a bad institution, and that producing fraudulent research is bad. I just don’t see what that has to do with academia as a whole.
If you agree with me that it is the extreme draws of quality that matter for academic work, I should convince you that the best work is indeed very good. So let’s work through some of the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which is by acclamation the best general interest journal (Econometrica is just as good, but a bit more abstruse), and see for ourselves whether it’s any good.
“The Power of Proximity to Coworkers”, by Emanuel, Harrington, and Pallais, is first. With Covid, we had an enormous shift to remote work, seemingly with no change, or even an increase, in productivity. EHP find that this was not a free lunch – being physically next to your colleagues led to workers, especially the younger, less experienced ones, gaining skill and increasing the quality of their code. Shifting to remote work is fine in the short-run but has consequences in the long-run. Does that seem like important work to you?
“Making the Invisible Hand Visible” by Virginia Minni is one of the best studies I’ve seen isolating what it is that managers do, and whether they matter. She has an enormous dataset covering hundreds of thousands of workers, which I believe to be from Unilever, and finds that managers substantially raise productivity through how they assign tasks to workers in ways that best match their skills. What’s more, good managers raise productivity, and bad managers do not undo it, which suggests that rotating managers around teams is optimal. Does that seem like important work to you?
“A Cognitive Theory of Reasoning and Choice” by Bordalo, Gennaioli, Lanzani, and Shleifer is an attempt to unify behavioral economics into a coherent whole. Economists used, for tractability, a simplified version of humanity – what we might call homo economicus. This individual has full information about the world and makes coherent and consistent predictions. Behavioral economics consisted substantially of piling up exceptions to the standard paradigm, as we uncovered them – people behave weirdly around risk, the order in which things are presented affects choices, and so on. They propose a method of modeling which can explain all of the anomalies together, focusing on how attention changes what people evaluate. For instance, somebody might evaluate an item on price when cued to think of it as “buying”, and might evaluate it on quality when cued to think of it as “consumption”. In particular, you can break up how much attention people pay in a decision making process into different parts, and estimate what part of the process they pay attention to and how much. Does that seem like important work to you?
“Codification, Technology Absorption, and the Globalization of the Industrial Revolution?” by Juhasz, Sakabe, and Weinstein, is a history paper weighing in on perhaps the biggest question in the world – why do countries become rich? Japan, starting with the Meiji Restoration, is one of the few countries where an industrial revolution took. Why did it happen? The authors argue that it was the codification of technical knowledge through the massive translation of books in other languages (of which just four, English, French, German, and Italian, accounted for 84% of all technical books) into Japanese. Having books on a domain translated led to more exports; other explanations for the Meiji Restoration’s success, like banks, railroads, and the constitution, do not explain this. Does that seem like important work to you?
Related to the global diffusion of technology, “Technology Sophistication Across Establishments” by Cirera, Comin, and Cruz is trying to see how much of the differences in global productivity are due to firms not adopting the latest versions of technologies. Previous work tended to take one technology and trace its diffusion across the world, but one technology cannot give us a good picture of the whole world. They find that firms in the developing world systematically do not use either the most advanced versions of technology, nor do they use the most common, with a survey of 21,000 firms across 15 countries, taking a random representative sample in each. Does that seem like important work to you?
The answer, for me, is yes. That does not mean that I love each of the papers without question. Within a hierarchy there is always room for finer and finer gradations. But for each of them, I think the question they are trying to answer is important, and they are contributing something novel and good. It is my further opinion, from reading a lot of papers, that this is representative of the standard of work across economics.
This post is brought to you by Mechanize, Inc. They are hiring for a variety of positions, including software engineers. I encourage you to apply here.
You are vastly downplaying the downsides. Sociology departments and whatever other meme field do influence society. They don’t influence it in random directions. It is consistent in the same bad direction. And they do that using taxpayers money.
Also, moderately bad or biased economy papers also influence society. Even if they don’t, you should want it to be more efficient and remove what is bad for taxpayers’ sake.
Also, why is Acemoglu elevated to the Nobel prize tier while his “inclusive institutions are the best thing ever“ theory is pretty shaky? How is a layman supposed to know what is a good top economist and someone who just looks like one?
"Poor work is read by no one and influences no one" is doing too much work here. Influence follows prestige, and prestigious work can be wrong. Reinhart-Rogoff got cited in budget speeches on two continents before anyone opened the spreadsheet. You can argue about how much it changed policy versus just supplied cover for it, but either way the cost wasn't the salary line.
And by your own arithmetic that's not a small worry. If one good paper is worth billions, then anything that raises the hit rate a few percent, or catches the bad ones earlier, is worth more than the whole cost of the mediocrities you're happy to fund. That seems like a reason to argue about how the system is set up rather than a reason not to