Sometimes people say things exactly right. It is most interesting to find a statement that is exactly wrong, where the wrongness is expressed exactly right. In the excerpt below, the authors say something very wrong, and they say it very well.
At the Why Nations Fail site we find Economic Research vs. the Blogosphere. Good title. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson write:
When one writes a blog, a newspaper column or a general commentary on economic and policy matters, this often distills well-understood and broadly-accepted notions in economics and draws its implications for a particular topic.
In original academic research (especially theoretical research), the point is not so much to apply already accepted notions in a slightly different context or draw their implications for recent policy debates, but to draw new parallels between apparently disparate topics or propositions, and potentially ask new questions in a way that changes some part of an academic debate.
For this reason, simplified models that lead to “counterintuitive” (read unexpected) conclusions are particularly valuable; they sometimes make both the writer and the reader think about the problem in a total of different manner (of course the qualifier “sometimes” is important here; sometimes they just fall flat on their face).
And because in this type of research the objective is not to construct a model that is faithful to reality but to develop ideas in the most transparent and simplest fashion; realism is not what we often strive for (this contrasts with other types of exercises, where one builds a model for quantitative exercise in which case capturing certain salient aspects of the problem at hand becomes particularly important).
Four sentences. In the original it is all one paragraph. My highlighting.In original academic research (especially theoretical research), the point is not so much to apply already accepted notions in a slightly different context or draw their implications for recent policy debates, but to draw new parallels between apparently disparate topics or propositions, and potentially ask new questions in a way that changes some part of an academic debate.
For this reason, simplified models that lead to “counterintuitive” (read unexpected) conclusions are particularly valuable; they sometimes make both the writer and the reader think about the problem in a total of different manner (of course the qualifier “sometimes” is important here; sometimes they just fall flat on their face).
And because in this type of research the objective is not to construct a model that is faithful to reality but to develop ideas in the most transparent and simplest fashion; realism is not what we often strive for (this contrasts with other types of exercises, where one builds a model for quantitative exercise in which case capturing certain salient aspects of the problem at hand becomes particularly important).
Here's a short version of the excerpt:
In original research, the point is to draw new parallels, to ask new questions, and to change the debate. Simplified models are particularly valuable to this effort. In this type of research the objective is not to construct a model that is faithful to reality but to develop ideas in the most transparent and simplest fashion.
That is the economists' version of adolescence, where people do things to be different, and not because those things make good sense.
The economy is the model.
The focus on ideas unconnected to reality is why economists fail.
1 comment:
Very good post. I guess we can blame Mill's "On The Definition and Method of Political Economy." After all, that's the article in which he made the case for theoretical economics rather than applied economics. It seems like that recommendation is still haunting the profession...
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