> 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.
Posner, I think, pointed out that there are species of fish that lay thousands of eggs merely to produce one or two offspring that make it to adulthood. Even if we grant that the great bulk of academic publishing is useless dreck, it does not follow that it is wasteful. It may well be that the same net output may be producible with lots of low quality or with a little high quality. How readily high and low quality can be substituted for one another depends on the product. I offer an example from the only industry I know anything about. Grain is usually shipped on large ships, and is dumped into the holds through large chutes. A non-trivial amount is lost in the process, because it isn't worth the cost to save it all (although there have been improvements over the years reducing the loss). The loss is compounded as the grain is transferred, between ships and terminals, and between trains and terminals, many times. A very good way to eliminate the waste is to package the grain into containers and seal them for the duration of the trip. Very little grain is shipped that way (usually expensive seeds), because the lost grain is usually less valuable than the cost of containerizing. Milgrom and Roberts' text mentions the same problem in car production, comparing Toyota and GM. They note that back in the fifties when Toyota was small, inventories were expensive for it relative to the cost of inventories for GM, because GM was so much larger and therefore bore proportionally smaller inventory costs (by the law of large numbers). Hence the use of just-in-time production. Just-in-time requires tight quality controls, because defective parts are a problem if your inputs arrive just as you are using them. If you maintain large parts inventories, you replace defective parts out of inventory. For GM, lower average quality of purchased inventory could produce the same average quality of used inventory, so long as GM bore inventory costs. Toyota's higher inventory costs made that an unprofitable production decision. So, I think the question of whether the production of dreck (or alternatively clever theorizing of no use to anyone) is wasteful requires that we have some idea of how best to produce good research. Clearly, there are journals that exist solely as outlets for economists at little teaching colleges to get in the one or two papers they need for tenure, for no obvious reason. Beyond that, though, it is not at all obvious to me how you get "The Problem of Social Cost" or "The Fable of the Bees" while avoiding uninteresting or pointless work. Bill Sjostrom +++++++++++++ William Sjostrom Senior Lecturer Department of Economics National University of Ireland, Cork Cork, Ireland +353-21-490-2091 (work) +353-21-427-3920 (fax) +353-21-463-4056 (home) [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.ucc.ie/~sjostrom/
