Harvard and MIT are in fact remarkably good at finding, evaluating and attracting top talent. It is stunning how good they are at this, and we should not begrudge them that,” he said.
But what if the top economics graduate schools squelch the talent that they find, shunting it into mediocrity? What if all of these talented folks were instead given a wider perspective on problems and more encouragement to pursue knowledge through means other than mathematical models and stylized statistical analysis?
I ended up following a non-academic path after graduate school. From a status-within-the-profession perspective, this was a loss. From an intellectual growth perspective, it was a win.
What I write does not make it into the American Economic Review. So much the worse for economists who rely on the AER.
Isn’t this true of all academic fields today?
At some point it becomes about jumping through hoops, signalling and gold stars on papers. For credentialism doth make careerists of us all.
Economists have a lot of faith that ‘the market’ will solve any problem with the strict hierarchy in the profession. If the methods used at MIT and Harvard are not the best, they will be toppled by and replaced with better methods. If there is a great researcher at Big State U who is not invited to clubby econ events, he or she will get hired by Harvard or MIT and join the club.
I’m skeptical because academia doesn’t generate profits or losses. They deal in reputation and prestige. This is much slower to react than are profits or losses. Behavioral economics and experimental economics, for example, did not originate in the top-5 club, and it took a long time for the research to become mainstream (as per the top-5 view). People like John List are the exception, not the norm. And even then, how long did it take for him to receive an offer from a top dept, even after he had been publishing a ridiculous number of top articles?