Les Coleman offers evidence and proposes solutions. Note this:
An excellent example is provided by American Economic Review, which is its discipline’s premier journal. AER celebrated its centenary in 2011 by commissioning a distinguished panel of researchers to choose the top 20 most “admirable and important articles” that the journal had published. This presumably would list economics’ most innovative and influential thinking. So it is staggering that the most recent of these articles dates to 1981: the leading economists of our day think it is almost 30 years since the pre-eminent AER published an important idea!
For solutions, Coleman suggests that
Funders should develop a detailed code of research practice; and—without affecting researchers’ independence—prioritise research that solves puzzles in paradigms and enables forecasts of important phenomena.
. . .universities should restrict funding to publishers with robust integrity programs, and preference journals which promote research quality. Publishers should centralise integrity checks of all submissions and send quality papers for review by qualified peers chosen at random. Journals should require self-replication of research so that innovative findings are confirmed in a totally independent setting. They should also adopt a multidisciplinary perspective, and encourage review articles which critically evaluate the prevailing paradigm with summaries including strengths and weaknesses and provide informed commentary on developments in research and its strategy.
I think that we should instead regard the peer-reviewed journal as an institution that is beyond reform. A whole new institution needs to be developed in the Internet age.
Kling said:
This is doubly true since academics made the colossal mistake of giving the full copyright of their papers to the peer-reviewed journals. A handful of large corporations have since bought all the independent journals and have executed a rent-seeking strategy, placing the public papers behind a disproportionately expensive pay wall. This problem was Aaron Swartz’s final focus before the response broke him and led to his suicide.
Radical! And populist! And anti-nationalist! After all a journal entitled “American” is obviously a nationalist enterprise. Also pro-productivity! Think of the gains from trade by eliminating largely publicly subsidized journal article writing in favor of free market activity. The academics can learn coding and the tax-paying entities can fill any market-demand for journal articles by paying cheap Indian and Chinese academics to pump them out. If this had been tried 30 years ago, you can be sure there would have been no slow down in innovation.
There is a significant difference between a national journal and a nationalist publication. Same goes for Islamic vs Islamist.
In computer science, there have been significant papers from both private corporations (e.g. Google and Amazon) as well as academia over the last two or three decades. Some professors are serial entrepreneurs (e.g. Michael Stonebreaker) while others contribute their work to patent free Open Source projects (e.g. Daniel Lemire). The public/private divide is quite fuzzy but impactful work floats to the top regardless of its origins.
Search engines work fine but the bookmarks need to be bit more intelligent.
Is it the journals which have gone wrong, the means of transmitting ideas to an academic audience? Or is it that the ideas themselves are too timid, or too poorly evaluated by their creators and reviewers? If the ideas appear weak, are they actually inconsequential, or do they simply seem banal because other academics have recently been struck by similar insights and written similar papers? Who would remember Newton today or think gravity such a great idea if 600 of his contemporaries had thought to consider planetary motion through simple algebraic formula (or had the clarity of mind to distinguish between force and momentum)?
Why would there be any good recent ideas?
There is nothing new under the sun.
Even NGDP targeting or MMT which are “new” Macro ideas have precedents in the 1920s/1950s.
Better finance theory starting in the 70s and on up to today. We can do a Nixon Shock with half the volatility, and that is not bad, that is a doubling of productivity in doing generation regime change. We can do a better MMT and a better NGDP targeting, again better by half. It is all about doing a double sided Black-Sholes option calculation, two financial flows predicting each other and the time variable can be removed.
I’ve got a question. Please enlighten me.
We’re told rather frequently that there is a crisis in modern R&D. Researrch productivity is declining, and thus more researchers are constantly needed to enable the same gains that were easily found in the past. As a particular example, we are told that “the number of researchers required to double chip density today is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s.”
So, have the number of people doing R&D gone up by a factor of 18 across the board? In ballpark numbers, the US has a population of about 180 million in 1970, vs about 350 million today. And in 1970, the US — government and business — spent about 2.75% of GNP on R&D. That employed, I don’t know, maybe 2.75% of 90 million workers, or 2.5 million people? And today, R&D spending in the US is … about 2.75% of GNP. Which employees maybe 2.75% of 175 million workers, or 4.8 million people? And if we take 2.5 million people and multiply by 18, we get ….
We don’t get a number that looks like 4.8 million people.
So what’s wrong? R&D productivity is dying and we’ve got to have 40 million people to do today what used to be done by 2.5 million. So we keep getting told. But there aren’t 40 million people in the US doing R&D; there are maybe 4 to 5 million.
So maybe the issue actually isn’t that “good ideas are hard to find”? Maybe the US has simply stopped doing a whole of R&D, and that the supposed ineffectiveness of modern R&D is actually determined by its nonexistence?
I’d like to know. And I’d like to know why nobody else is asking this stupid question.