OK Robin so you want to say that consumer wants not truth or relevance but signals about smartness. Then our profession is doing a decent job, but the opportunity cost of this is huge. Economics is a particularly relevant discipline for public policy and social understanding. I believe there our truths in the economic world that are particularly costly not to recognize.
Can you make an argument that the unintended consequence of this smartness signalling actually is closer approximations to the truth? If so, then I think you would have a neat argument. BTW, in the economy we can discuss efficiency (technical) because somehow the underlying realities of tastes, technology and resource endowment are reflected in the induced variables of prices and profit/loss. If there was no connection between these, then in what sense would we be able to talk about allocational efficiency? Similarly, in academics if we don't have an underlying reality of "truth" and the scientific community somehow following the induced variables of prestige, position, power that gets at closer approximations of the underlying "reality" then in what sense is the academic market efficiently organized? Pete Peter J. Boettke, Deputy Director James M. Buchanan Center for Political Economy Department of Economics, MSN 3G4 George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030 PHONE: 703-993-1149 FAX: 703-993-1133 EMAIL: [EMAIL PROTECTED] HOMEPAGE: http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/pboettke ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robin Hanson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 11:14 AM Subject: Re: Not such a fantastically entertaining paper > Peter J. Boettke wrote: > >... But the bottom line problem with this > >entrepreneurial hope in the market for academic economics is that we don't > >have institutions that serve the functions analogous to property, prices and > >profit and loss. > > The standard story is that authors have a property right in their articles, > which are in effect sold to students, and research patrons. Journals and > universities are intermediaries in this process, but all these transactions > seem to voluntary, and real money is on the line. What's wrong with this > story? > > >P.S.: Robin, I think the statement that entry is cheap is a little dubious. > >We go through an entire process ... graduate school ... getting a job. ... > > The topic was entry into the journal industry, which takes even more effort > than entry into the professor industry. But I meant "easy" in the > industrial organization sense of closer to free entry than to monopoly. > I'm sure its not easy to be a farmer, but farming also seems to be an > industry where entry is easy enough to keep the industry competitive. > > >... Scholarship should never be cheap, nor easy, nor kind ... > >but I think it is at best a noble lie to believe that the truth wins out in > >academics ... Careerism, fadism, cults of personality, and generally a > >waste of intellectual resources describe academic life, not truth seeking > >and original thinking. I would have thought you'd be more sympathetic. > > I agree that academia wastes vast resources relative to the goal of seeking > truth, but I disagree that this implies a market failure, mainly because I > don't think the ultimate customers fundamentally want truth. In fact, I > think customers in part want faddism and cults of personality. > > My working model of academia is that students and research patrons primarily > pay to be associated with people who are publicly validated to be smart in > certain ways. People try to show that they are smart by publishing writings > that are articulate, clever, thought-provoking, require difficult techniques, > and anticipate fads. Truth is often a side-effect, but is incidental to > the main purposes of the parties involved. Different academic disciplines > have settled into equilibria with different mixtures of these elements. I > think this model can explain many otherwise puzzling features of academia. > > [We had a similar discussion of this topic on this list last November] > > > Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu > Asst. Prof. Economics, George Mason University > MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444 > 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323 > >
