Great summary. The economics profession should be doing more write-ups like this that give non-economists an easy entry it the key principles derived from the field.
"What I have found is that the right way to read economic papers is to not read them cover to cover, except in uncommon cases." - Agree. I'd be interested in hearing how you do read them. One of my favorite macro professors trained us to read tons of papers per week with an eye for a handful of basic questions - stuff like "How is the research question important for academics? How is the research question important for policy makers? What is their contribution (is it a question no one has asked before, or are they approaching an existing question with better methods, or something else)?" etc etc. They're obvious questions, but for some reason, being trained to read every paper like a search-and-find game for those questions made me way more efficient at extracting and retaining info from them. Now I just always have those in the back of my mind when I read a paper, which causes me to get way more value from "skimming" than I did before. Do you have any sort of procedure like that?
Nothing so systematic, but in practice I do. My method of reading papers is roughly as follows:
I am first curious about the importance of the question. Now, I do not always mean the event or industry they are studying. Some papers answering unimportant topics do so with new methods, and it’s really the methods which are the question. An unimportant question is going to take doing other things perfectly to be read at all, and that might not even suffice.
Next I want to know their methods. Can their methods answer the question they’ve identified? The most disappointing papers are those which pretend to answer an important question in the introduction, and then answer something else entirely in the paper on account of data difficulties
Establishing why a question is important is generally very obvious and easy to me, although it might get a bit fuzzy in fields I’m less familiar with.
One absolutely builds up a familiarity with how papers will answer the question, and you start to write the paper in your head before you read it. You know what they *should* say and what they *should* do. That’s what I mean by a paper being disappointing. You know exactly what they will say if they have a great paper.
Thank you for the write up! Non-economist here who’s been roughing an education via public source information. Sorry for the banal question, bur how do you read while walking around? I feel like I’d either hurt my neck or run into things/people.
On reading papers... How people do that various and has been a little studied. I mention it in asking can the generalist reader become a speciality....
I dont really understand this way of looking at the discipline.
Maybe you think of it as applied math and stats but in the pursuit of what? What exactly are you optimizng for here, where mathifying the problem comes first and useful conclusions second?
I did not dignify it with a response then. I do not think that Mr. Narayan is familiar with most of the papers presented. I do not think he even read the titles — “The Simple Economics of Optimal Auctions”? Really?
Great summary. The economics profession should be doing more write-ups like this that give non-economists an easy entry it the key principles derived from the field.
😂
Spoken like a true “posturing morherfucker who rectum sniffs his phoniness incessantly.”
"What I have found is that the right way to read economic papers is to not read them cover to cover, except in uncommon cases." - Agree. I'd be interested in hearing how you do read them. One of my favorite macro professors trained us to read tons of papers per week with an eye for a handful of basic questions - stuff like "How is the research question important for academics? How is the research question important for policy makers? What is their contribution (is it a question no one has asked before, or are they approaching an existing question with better methods, or something else)?" etc etc. They're obvious questions, but for some reason, being trained to read every paper like a search-and-find game for those questions made me way more efficient at extracting and retaining info from them. Now I just always have those in the back of my mind when I read a paper, which causes me to get way more value from "skimming" than I did before. Do you have any sort of procedure like that?
Nothing so systematic, but in practice I do. My method of reading papers is roughly as follows:
I am first curious about the importance of the question. Now, I do not always mean the event or industry they are studying. Some papers answering unimportant topics do so with new methods, and it’s really the methods which are the question. An unimportant question is going to take doing other things perfectly to be read at all, and that might not even suffice.
Next I want to know their methods. Can their methods answer the question they’ve identified? The most disappointing papers are those which pretend to answer an important question in the introduction, and then answer something else entirely in the paper on account of data difficulties
Establishing why a question is important is generally very obvious and easy to me, although it might get a bit fuzzy in fields I’m less familiar with.
One absolutely builds up a familiarity with how papers will answer the question, and you start to write the paper in your head before you read it. You know what they *should* say and what they *should* do. That’s what I mean by a paper being disappointing. You know exactly what they will say if they have a great paper.
Maybe authors should include sections that answer those questions?
Thank you for the write up! Non-economist here who’s been roughing an education via public source information. Sorry for the banal question, bur how do you read while walking around? I feel like I’d either hurt my neck or run into things/people.
Don’t read when there’s lots of people around
Reading your Substack and tweets has genuinely made me want to apply to GMU. Any advice?
On reading papers... How people do that various and has been a little studied. I mention it in asking can the generalist reader become a speciality....
https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/the-reader-as-a-trade
I dont really understand this way of looking at the discipline.
Maybe you think of it as applied math and stats but in the pursuit of what? What exactly are you optimizng for here, where mathifying the problem comes first and useful conclusions second?
I did not dignify it with a response then. I do not think that Mr. Narayan is familiar with most of the papers presented. I do not think he even read the titles — “The Simple Economics of Optimal Auctions”? Really?