The Facebooking of Economics
by Paul Krugman / Read more @ NY Times
David Brooks has a funny piece today about the new profession of Thought Leaders. I think I know who he’s talking about. But I started thinking about my own neck of the woods — and while the rules of the game in economics are definitely changing, it’s nothing like what David describes.
What is true is that there has been a major erosion of the old norms. It used to be the case that to have a role in the economics discourse you had to have formal credentials and a position of authority; you had to be a tenured professor at a top school publishing in top journals, or a senior government official. Today the ongoing discourse, especially in macroeconomics, is much more free-form.
But you don’t get to play a major role in that discourse by publishing clever Slateish snark; you get there by saying smart things backed by data.
Obviously the web has changed a lot, although the process actually started even before the rise of blogs. Economics journals stopped being a way to communicate ideas at least 25 years ago, replaced by working papers; publication was more about certification for the purposes of tenure than anything else. Partly this was because of the long lags — by the time my most successful (though by no means best) academic paper was actually published, in 1991, there were around 150 derivative papers that I knew of, and the target zone literature was running into diminishing returns. Partly, also, it was because in some fields rigid ideologies blocked new ideas. Don’t take my word for it: It was Ken Rogoff, not me, who wrote about the impossibility of publishing realistic macro in the face of “new neoclassical repression.”
Anyway, at this point the real discussion in macro, and to a lesser extent in other fields, is taking place in the econoblogosphere. This is true even for research done at official institutions like the IMF and the Fed: people read their working papers online, and that’s how their work gets incorporated into the discourse.
How does the econoblogosphere work? It’s a lot like the 17th-century coffee shop culture Tom Standage describes in his lovely book Writing on the Wall. People with shared interests in effect meet in cyberspace (although many of them are, as it happens, also sitting in real coffee shops at the time, as I am now), exchange ideas, write them up, and make those writeups available to others when they think they’re especially interesting.
As Standage explains, this informal system gradually evolved into the modern structure of scientific journals, as the process of circulating research writing became formalized, with refereeing as a form of quality check. But the way it began, as Standage says, was in important ways more like social media than like centralized publication with clear lines of authority.
And now we’re back to something like that world.
So who are the players in this world? Well, look at any of the various rankings of economics blogs — say, the one at Onalytica. I don’t see any of Brooks’s Thought Leaders there. I see a lot of solid professional economists; a number of equally solid economic journalists; and a few people who don’t fall into standard categories, but are by no means the kind of shallow operator Brooks describes. Mike Konczal at Next New Deal, for example, doesn’t fit any of the old categories, but does utterly serious and important work.
Well, and there’s Zero Hedge, but it’s an imperfect world.
Does this new, amorphous system work? Yes! In just the past few years we’ve had what I’d consider three classic economic debates — on the effects of monetary expansion at the zero lower bound, on fiscal multipliers and austerity, on the effects of high debt ratios; the emergence of major new themes involving issues like private-sector leverage and the need for safe assets; and more, all strongly informed by data. Of course most of the people on the losing side of these debates refuse to admit having been wrong, but it was ever thus — science progresses funeral by funeral and all that.
So don’t feel nostalgic for the days of authority figures dominating the discourse. Intellectually, in economics at least, these are the good old days.
