I had dinner with a Chicago economist one night several years ago in which the topic of Levitt's popularity came up. He said that at UC, it gets very polemical, particularly when certain Nobel Laureates complain about Levitt's work. He then said something to this effect - he wishes everyone would quit complaining (he thought some of it was jealousy) because Levitt's was expanding the pie, so to speak, and making it easier for others to do more interesting work. So we finished our meal, and that was that.
In light of Emily Oster's latest Hepatitis B paper, which finds no evidence for it explaining the female deficit in Asia, I'm wondering if that UC economist didn't overstate things. To quote Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility." Now I see a serious backlash which is basically, "economists need to quit sticking their noses in everything." Probably what it is, really, though, is simply that there's some low hanging fruit outside our discipline where economists could come in and easily snag it. Then as we pushed harder, we ended up in the same places as the more seasoned researchers in those areas. Maybe that's why there's an incentive to find counter-intuitive results. Plus, I think there's a built-in bias being at Chicago (though Emily was at Harvard when she wrote the paper, Chicago's De Gustibus Non Est Disputadum paradigm of Becker-Stigler, I think, basically made this the de fact bias of every department since we're all Chicago economists now) against appealing to cultural explanations when trying to explain some phenomenon. It just seems like cheating to economists that when you see something - say, a lot of missing women in a country - that the reason is because, well, people prefer sons. Turns out, that's probably the right answer, but ex ante, it nonetheless feels lazy.
In Becker and Stiglers's paper De Gustibus, they basically recommended pushing price theory as far as it'll go, really until it breaks. I like that. Thing is, I guess it's going to at some point break. And we all would like to believe it won't be us that is doing the breaking when it does, but that's part of it. Despite all the negative publicity Emily's been getting (as part of this overall anti-freakonomics backlash), I think science went forward through it. Of course, I also think we have to be careful. At a retreat, I was telling a non-economist what I studied and they said, "So can you basically do the 'economics of ...' anything? Like could I write the "economics of Buffy the VAmpire Slayer"? And I said, "well, yes and no. Yes, right now, there's a lot of papers that are just plain clever, in the worst way. But, at the same time, economists have a lot at their disposal - methods, data, computer power, and market incentives (eg, Freakonomics' success) - so it's probably not a surprise. But, two, it's shaking out, and I think we're at a new place where people just aren't all that impressed by novelty like they once were."
Still, the search for truth is not uncorrelated with the desire for novel things. It's a lower order motivation, to be sure, though.
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Weird. I was just having exactly this same conversation with Genna, because she was saying that if her idea was just a novel way at looking at things, then she didn't want to do it, but if it was the truth, then she wanted to expose it. I said that a lot of the clever papers in the humanities were sort of a scholarly legitimization of postmodern subjectivism, where you get scholarly points for coming up with some hypothetical universe where some text could have meant some such thing, and it doesn't matter if that view has any basis in reality.
She was surprised when I explained how I thought this had crept into economics, with people writing papers that were just for the sake of cleverness. I think the worst example of this was that paper on infidelity at the southern meetings. No identification, no scholarly merit at all, but the presenter nevertheless was proud of how cute it was.
I think you're absolutely right. I think this is absolutely the analogue to postmodern subjectivism in other departments.
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