> There are some toxic fields of research, but I don't think this attitude is particularly common in the academia.
The author was formerly an economics student, where this attitude is quite common. It might have colored his perspective.
The author was formerly an economics student, where this attitude is quite common. It might have colored his perspective.
(cuz it's hard to predict the economic future of the entire human race)
1. Social science matters. If we predict inflation wrong, or mistake what causes development, we screw up the world. (Hello Gunnar Myrdal.)
Therefore, if there’s a tradeoff between a nice atmosphere and getting things right, we should always prefer getting things right.
2. There is a rightness-maximizing level of savagery, which is strictly positive.
Bad ideas must be challenged. Sometimes bad ideas get entrenched. Then they must be challenged loudly and persistently.
Fields where this doesn’t happen tend to degenerate into back-scratching cliques. (Hello, humanities.)
Now clearly there is some level of savagery which is TOO savage. If you destroy a PhD student’s confidence, that’s hurtful and you’ve lost their future contributions. Aggression from the top can be used to defend entrenched but mistaken ideas.
And there’s certainly toxic behaviour in economics. I’ve seen it and experienced it!
3. Nevertheless, overall, econ does better at removing bad ideas than other social sciences. Our models can be critiqued… other soc scis often just have verbal models which are too vague to be wrong! Our focus on good research design to uncover causality is stronger than many other fields, also.
Lastly:
4. There’s more than one kind of toxicity.
There are many stories of bad abuses of power - eg sexual harassment - in supposedly “warm”, and highly feminist, fields like Eng Lit. Doubtless there are many reasons for any differences between fields. But I think one underestimated factor is that when there’s no ruthless, hard-faced empirical rigour, when theories are vague and evidence is narrative, then getting published comes to depend on academic politics - on alliances and cliques. That is a fertile breeding ground for abuse of power.
I've been completely dismantled in a presentation before, and public health has fairly high stakes as well, but I let people finish their sentence first. The number of interruptions that were then addressed with "That's on the next slide" was staggering.
> The Superiority of Economists
> There exists an implicit pecking order among the social sciences, and it seems to be dominated by economics. For starters, economists see themselves at or near the top of the disciplinary hierarchy. In a survey conducted in the early 2000s, Colander (2005) found that 77 percent of economics graduate students in elite programs agree with the statement that “economics is the most scientific of the social sciences.” Some 15 years ago, Richard Freeman (1999, p. 141) speculated on the origins of such a conviction in the pages of this journal. His assessment was candid: “[S]ociologists and political scientists have less powerful analytical tools and know less than we do, or so we believe. By scores on the Graduate Record Examina- tion and other criteria, our field attracts students stronger than theirs, and our courses are more mathematically demanding.”
Perhaps if I had commented about PhD students. I specified "places" because there are lots of places to work, and the miserable folks are mostly found in a small percentage of places you can work as an academic economist.
> There is a very visible ranking and you’d get substantial agreement on it from most academic economists.
Others are free to define "top" as they wish. I am under no obligation to accept their definition.