Open Science And The Econoblogosphere

"... all too often, it seems to act as a way for entrenched doctrines to blockade new ideas, or at least to keep people with new ideas from getting tenure at a good school." Excellent points. Peer review is not necessarily the issue, and could play a constructive role if only the "peers" were not closely allied with the plutocrats and self-styled "aristocrats" of the disciplines.

It turns out that a self-policing online community does a really good job of voting for popular-sounding principles and outcomes, but not necessarily those that are factually based. We can't, for instance, determine the cosmological constant by a Facebook poll. And I think that's where we are right now; the vast majority of lay people believe that their wishes carry weight when it comes to hardened, discernable physical FACTS.

When blithely ignorant opinion overcomes fact, then the system breaks down. And fixing it requires a complete overhaul.

Ah, la revolucion!

Thank you Professor Krugman:

Our classic great pop singers were great to view. Concerning the open communication issue I've produced a report on a topic in my field and thought this might be useful but lost my corporate position before I discovered the equations leading to the fully appropriate form of the concept. I've made a few contacts to others in the field to see if they were interested in pursuing this but haven't gotten any responses either positive or negative or pointing out any deficiences in my equations. Due to some major personal problems in the past few years, I've been somewhat derelict in pursuing this and need to make further contacts. But thank you for pointing out and analyzing the NYT article. Maybe I can utilize some of those ideas.

Prof. this comment is not really to do with your post; but can you tell me if you think gold imports/exports should be classified as a trade account item or a capital account item? In India its classified as a trade account item which I feel is absurd since buying gold is sort of like buying a perpetual, zero coupon deep discounted bond (or even a currency assuming that people in the world treat it as such - at least it is still considered gold a store of value by many; though I suppose it does not serve as a medium of exchange or unit of account).

Thank you for that. My wife's experience in academic nursing is similar.

Mentors are critical to getting you in the productive circles that move an academic research career along.

One note to add. If your background is working class, and you went to graduate school later in life than the "out-of-high-school-on-to-college" crowd, mentors are hard to come by. The combination of independent thought and a stiff spine that a bit of life experience gives you is just too much for most possible mentors to manage.

I have read carefully my wife's research and always am deeply impressed. She combines a fierce loyalty to her patients and research subjects with carefully thought-out theories looking for ways to improve nursing practice. I think I love her most for that.

But, now she works full time as a regular nurse because academia did not work out for her. She is such a wonderful nurse, but misses the research part of her life very much.

I am going to suggest we take a page out of your article and look to the more fluid world of the internet for nursing research. It is not as hight powered as the economics world -- but maybe, just maybe she can build on something there.

tks

I think that a commitment of bloggers (including you, Prof K) t respond to selected comments on blogs that seem to merit that attention would improve the interchange of ideas and learning that is facilitated through blogs. Some bloggers do quite a bit of that, some less, and I would particularly like to see more of that in this blog. I realize that that would take time from other activities including generating new blog topics, but it would be valuable to those of us trying to learn by reading and trying to understand blog content.

economics is closer to law in the sense it is about forcing choices on unsuspecting citizens.

lawyers and economists don't pursue the truth. they represent interests and are paid to articulate them.

economists call themselves objective to deceive society. Most lazy and fraud journalists write dubious articles with "economists suggest" CYA sentences (just watch how many times the economist word is used to pull rank).

Three years to get published? That would never stand in the hard sciences. In the lab where I did my Master's in Biochem, the turnaround time from submission to advance online publication was never more than 5 months, which included all revisions and responses to reviewers. If we had to wait three years to see our work show up in PubMed, there would be general rioting in the streets of college towns across America.

I think the real difference between economics and hard sciences is that publications (in journals) are absolutely essential for receiving research grant money. Basically, you have to list 5-15 relevant published peer-review papers. Until recently, some funding agencies wouldn't even count accepted papers in press as part of that list.

For getting hard science research grants (which can lead to tenure, pay increases, etc.), publications are currency.

In my self-appointed role as retired English professor copy editor, I urge you to save your "regards" for Broadway and simply "regard" hard science.

I have to agree. The system as it was in the late 70's and early 80's -- who you knew was so critical -- was one of the major reasons I left the filed without getting my Phd. It may not work as well in the "hard" sciences but the informality now seems a much better approach for economics.

Absolute nonsense! The Oligarchs have already created fake news organizations, fake think tanks, and they're trying to create fake science journals.

This invites abuse by corporations who want to muddy the waters on any issue where they can make more money. There will be so much junk out there that it will make it impossible for the public to distinguish legitimate science from another effort of the Oligarchs to deliberately mislead and manipulate an uninformed public.

It would turn science into another blogosphere food fight. Almost every day Dr. Krugman fights the fake economics from the blogosphere, imagine if the blogosphere was indistinguishable from what is supposed to be legitimate science.

The journals most certainly have problems and need to be reformed, but this is not the way and feeds right into the hands of the anti-science Republican Oligarchs.

I think many scientists use http://arXiv.org/ now. (The closest to an economics category is "Quantitative Finance".)

The philosopher Huw Price http://prce.hu/ (Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge) defines "truth" as "convenient friction". I think that the dialectical, community-interactive (internet) approach to publication will replace the old, secretive "peer-reviewed" process.

There are a number of repositories for posting papers, such as arxiv in the physical sciences which has been running for 20 years. This has solved the problem of publishing (i.e., putting in the public domain) academic papers.

The thing that is missing is a community-organised peer reviewing process. It can't be too hard to invent some standard software to manage this process, can it? The only output a journal needs now is a list of approved papers with links to the public repository.

When this is done a large proportion of the parasitic commercial publications will be redundant.

It is an excellent piece revealing major tendencies in data/idea exchange via the Internet. With a smart request, one can retrieve what s/he needs right now (appropriately formatted) skipping all unnecessary information. This option makes almost all research processes much faster except the one related to the creation of new ideas. Thus, this is the time for ideas to compete.

With all (free) math and statistical tools it takes couple days now to process huge amounts of data and get result in publishable formats, i.e. nicely drawn figures and tables. Why wait years for a journal publication? However, all references in any publication still have to be “good”, i.e. top ten journals in the field are required independent on the quality and priority of ideas in the referenced publications. This is important for career and general prosperity. This is like wisdom of old days. Elder generations always had life wisdom advantage to control youngsters. It’s not working any more with technology revolutions every 10 years and signers/football players/computer geeks earning millions.

Well, the econoblogosphere brings out into the open what a lot or economists really think - for better and worse. And it's indeed some kind of purgatory: some people who are accepted by the thirty odd men mentioned - shouldn't have.

But I miss one thing. Integral part of the economblogosphere are things (how do you call these) like 'Fred', or the Eurostat databases, the IMF databases and the like. Knowing how to use these data becomes increasingly important for economists, including knowledge about the way they are measured and aggregated. compare the discussion on this blog about the ULC (Unit Labor Costs concept, which never, never should have been used to gauge the comptetivess of countries. It was not designed for this purpose, it does not serve this purpose - but economists never cared. Now they do, a little more. Well, 'economists'? The Levy institute of course published studies showing this already some time ago. But I suppose this is another group of thirty? The econoblogosphere brings these discussions out into the open.

Also, a lot of very good stuff and discussions on the sphere will never make the journals as they are too 'light', take these quotes of Central Bankers which show that they basically agree with the Post-Keynesian view that money creation is deeply 'endogenous' (and Central Banks can't control 'money):

http://www.luxetveritas.nl/blog/?p=1346

Economics becomes a science.

If one more person uses the term 'spot on' I am gonna fro up all over my key board. I hate when expressions become cool. It's like goatees, about the time everyone HAS to get one it is so in that it is out, and then they just seem gross. Like a MOVE suit, but that was beyond done in the late 70's? In fact, I think there was a jr. high school teacher that I didn't like, named Judson, whom all the other kids thought was cool, who wore MOVE suits, but little did they know he wore fish nets on the weekend. I actually liked him better when I found out about the fish nets, and the 'cool' kids turned on him.

Interesting commentary by Krugman. I think the blogs and websites have sped up the dissemination of knowledge globally, in all fields.

The rise of Market Monetarism was web-based, and I think it is the most promising development in economics since Keynes.

Now, there are only two kinds of monetarists, and really economists: Market Monetarists and Theo-Monetarists.

As a Market Monetarist you have a practical idea how to stimulate the economy. As a Theo-monetarist you just pray things get better while genuflecting to gold or the stagnant value of paper currency.

Keynesians are really Market Monetarists, if they call for the Fed to accommodate federal deficit spending. Then it is the same thing.

Refereeing or reviewing (grant proposals as well as publications) definitely has its problems in many academic fields. Perhaps not unlike the problem of getting good jurors. It's hard for editors or program officers at NSF, NIH, etc to get smart, well trained, experienced, thoughtful people to take time to review others' work when they have had no training in it, don't get any credit or pay for it, and time is so precious for their own teaching, research and publication. As a result, grad students, young professionals, and less busy people may often be reviewers -- a good learning experience for them and one that should be part of their training, but not necessarily good for the paper being reviewed due to their limited experience and narrow perspective. I've had the experience of being reviewed by people with seriously poor knowledge or misunderstanding (e.g. requiring a change in your data analysis that would be inappropriate). It's common they take very little time to read the manuscript too. You just hope you can convince the editor that your work is in fact correct or wise. If you are doing something "new" it may well not be accepted by the average reviewer or editor even if 10-20 yrs later it turns out to be prescient. In some fields it's incredibly difficult to find reviewers who know enough about the subject to review it well. Imagine being a reviewer for a math proof that is 1200 pages long! Reviewing proposals may be worse in that it limits what work gets funded.

Amen.

You should check out arxiv.org. This is a web site that physicists used to essentially replace journals starting in the early 1990s.

I don't know if there's something like this for economics, but there should be.

Sounds like econ was in a sad state it comes to publishing. In the biosciences peer review in traditional works well (ignoring the fact that the journals make $ off government funded research and don't make it publicly available without subscription). The clubiness exists as in any field, but ultimately if one's work is good one doesn't need to be "inside" to get published. Just do the damn controls and prove it. That's ultimately what is needed to get published. A difference between "hard" and "soft" sciences is that in hard sciences one often can provide VERY strong experimental support for a hypothesis. Even a peasant can take down a fully armored knight (Nobelist for example) if one's ideas are ultimately correct (and one did the right experiments/controls).

This certainly goes for scientific journals dealing with biology.  What's the point in reading journal articles whose claims are suspect at best?  They help you get ideas about where to go with your own research for one thing.  They can start a conversation about important topics and get others to get involved with another's research, for another.  Science is hard and expensive and the more aware scientists are of each other's work, the more progress can be made.  Online publishing and blogging can only help the process.