Rogoff

Reflections at the crossroads

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, experimental economics, inequality, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 21 JDN 2460332

When this post goes live, I will have just passed my 36th birthday. (That means I’ve lived for about 1.1 billion seconds, so in order to be as rich as Elon Musk, I’d need to have made, on average, since birth, $200 per second—$720,000 per hour.)

I certainly feel a lot better turning 36 than I did 35. I don’t have any particular additional accomplishments to point to, but my life has already changed quite a bit, in just that one year: Most importantly, I quit my job at the University of Edinburgh, and I am currently in the process of moving out of the UK and back home to Michigan. (We moved the cat over Christmas, and the movers have already come and taken most of our things away; it’s really just us and our luggage now.)

But I still don’t know how to field the question that people have been asking me since I announced my decision to do this months ago:

“What’s next?”

I’m at a crossroads now, trying to determine which path to take. Actually maybe it’s more like a roundabout; it has a whole bunch of different paths, surely not just two or three. The road straight ahead is labeled “stay in academia”; the others at the roundabout are things like “freelance writing”, “software programming”, “consulting”, and “tabletop game publishing”. There’s one well-paved and superficially enticing road that I’m fairly sure I don’t want to take, labeled “corporate finance”.

Right now, I’m just kind of driving around in circles.

Most people don’t seem to quit their jobs without a clear plan for where they will go next. Often they wait until they have another offer in hand that they intend to take. But when I realized just how miserable that job was making me, I made the—perhaps bold, perhaps courageous, perhaps foolish—decision to get out as soon as I possibly could.

It’s still hard for me to fully understand why working at Edinburgh made me so miserable. Many features of an academic career are very appealing to me. I love teaching, I like doing research; I like the relatively flexible hours (and kinda need them, because of my migraines).

I often construct formal decision models to help me make big choices—generally it’s a linear model, where I simply rate each option by its relative quality in a particular dimension, then try different weightings of all the different dimensions. I’ve used this successfully to pick out cars, laptops, even universities. I’m not entrusting my decisions to an algorithm; I often find myself tweaking the parameters to try to get a particular result—but that in itself tells me what I really want, deep down. (Don’t do that in research—people do, and it’s bad—but if the goal is to make yourself happy, your gut feelings are important too.)

My decision models consistently rank university teaching quite high. It generally only gets beaten by freelance writing—which means that maybe I should give freelance writing another try after all.

And yet, my actual experience at Edinburgh was miserable.

What went wrong?

Well, first of all, I should acknowledge that when I separate out the job “university professor” into teaching and research as separate jobs in my decision model, and include all that goes into both jobs—not just the actual teaching, but the grading and administrative tasks; not just doing the research, but also trying to fund and publish it—they both drop lower on the list, and research drops down a lot.

Also, I would rate them both even lower now, having more direct experience of just how awful the exam-grading, grant-writing and journal-submitting can be.

Designing and then grading an exam was tremendously stressful: I knew that many of my students’ futures rested on how they did on exams like this (especially in the UK system, where exams are absurdly overweighted! In most of my classes, the final exam was at least 60% of the grade!). I struggled mightily to make the exam as fair as I could, all the while knowing that it would never really feel fair and I didn’t even have the time to make it the best it could be. You really can’t assess how well someone understands an entire subject in a multiple-choice exam designed to take 90 minutes. It’s impossible.

The worst part of research for me was the rejection.

I mentioned in a previous post how I am hypersensitive to rejection; applying for grants and submitting to journals was clearly the worst feelings of rejection I’ve felt in any job. It felt like they were evaluting not only the value of my work, but my worth as a scientist. Failure felt like being told that my entire career was a waste of time.

It was even worse than the feeling of rejection in freelance writing (which is one of the few things that my model tells me is bad about freelancing as a career for me, along with relatively low and uncertain income). I think the difference is that a book publisher is saying “We don’t think we can sell it.”—’we’ and ‘sell’ being vital. They aren’t saying “this is a bad book; it shouldn’t exist; writing it was a waste of time.”; they’re just saying “It’s not a subgenre we generally work with.” or “We don’t think it’s what the market wants right now.” or even “I personally don’t care for it.”. They acknowledge their own subjective perspective and the fact that it’s ultimately dependent on forecasting the whims of an extremely fickle marketplace. They aren’t really judging my book, and they certainly aren’t judging me.

But in research publishing, it was different. Yes, it’s all in very polite language, thoroughly spiced with sophisticated jargon (though some reviewers are more tactful than others). But when your grant application gets rejected by a funding agency or your paper gets rejected by a journal, the sense really basically is “This project is not worth doing.”; “This isn’t good science.”; “It was/would be a waste of time and money.”; “This (theory or experiment you’ve spent years working on) isn’t interesting or important.” Nobody ever came out and said those things, nor did they come out and say “You’re a bad economist and you should feel bad.”; but honestly a couple of the reviews did kinda read to me like they wanted to say that. They thought that the whole idea that human beings care about each other is fundamentally stupid and naive and not worth talking about, much less running experiments on.

It isn’t so much that I believed them that my work was bad science. I did make some mistakes along the way (but nothing vital; I’ve seen far worse errors by Nobel Laureates). I didn’t have very large samples (because every person I add to the experiment is money I have to pay, and therefore funding I have to come up with). But overall I do believe that my work is sufficiently rigorous to be worth publishing in scientific journals.

It’s more that I came to feel that my work is considered bad, that the kind of work I wanted to do would forever be an uphill battle against an implacable enemy. I already feel exhausted by that battle, and it had only barely begun. I had thought that behavioral economics was a more successful paradigm by now, that it had largely displaced the neoclassical assumptions that came before it; but I was wrong. Except specifically in journals dedicated to experimental and behavioral economics (of which prestigious journals are few—I quickly exhausted them), it really felt like a lot of the feedback I was getting amounted to, “I refuse to believe your paradigm.”.

Part of the problem, also, was that there simply aren’t that many prestigious journals, and they don’t take that many papers. The top 5 journals—which, for whatever reason, command far more respect than any other journals among economists—each accept only about 5-10% of their submissions. Surely more than that are worth publishing; and, to be fair, much of what they reject probably gets published later somewhere else. But it makes a shockingly large difference in your career how many “top 5s” you have; other publications almost don’t matter at all. So once you don’t get into any of those (which of course I didn’t), should you even bother trying to publish somewhere else?

And what else almost doesn’t matter? Your teaching. As long as you show up to class and grade your exams on time (and don’t, like, break the law or something), research universities basically don’t seem to care how good a teacher you are. That was certainly my experience at Edinburgh. (Honestly even their responses to professors sexually abusing their students are pretty unimpressive.)

Some of the other faculty cared, I could tell; there were even some attempts to build a community of colleagues to support each other in improving teaching. But the administration seemed almost actively opposed to it; they didn’t offer any funding to support the program—they wouldn’t even buy us pizza at the meetings, the sort of thing I had as an undergrad for my activist groups—and they wanted to take the time we spent in such pedagogy meetings out of our grading time (probably because if they didn’t, they’d either have to give us less grading, or some of us would be over our allotted hours and they’d owe us compensation).

And honestly, it is teaching that I consider the higher calling.

The difference between 0 people knowing something and 1 knowing it is called research; the difference between 1 person knowing it and 8 billion knowing it is called education.

Yes, of course, research is important. But if all the research suddenly stopped, our civilization would stagnate at its current level of technology, but otherwise continue unimpaired. (Frankly it might spare us the cyberpunk dystopia/AI apocalypse we seem to be hurtling rapidly toward.) Whereas if all education suddenly stopped, our civilization would slowly decline until it ultimately collapsed into the Stone Age. (Actually it might even be worse than that; even Stone Age cultures pass on knowledge to their children, just not through formal teaching. If you include all the ways parents teach their children, it may be literally true that humans cannot survive without education.)

Yet research universities seem to get all of their prestige from their research, not their teaching, and prestige is the thing they absolutely value above all else, so they devote the vast majority of their energy toward valuing and supporting research rather than teaching. In many ways, the administrators seem to see teaching as an obligation, as something they have to do in order to make money that they can spend on what they really care about, which is research.

As such, they are always making classes bigger and bigger, trying to squeeze out more tuition dollars (well, in this case, pounds) from the same number of faculty contact hours. It becomes impossible to get to know all of your students, much less give them all sufficient individual attention. At Edinburgh they even had the gall to refer to their seminars as “tutorials” when they typically had 20+ students. (That is not tutoring!)And then of course there were the lectures, which often had over 200 students.

I suppose it could be worse: It could be athletics they spend all their money on, like most Big Ten universities. (The University of Michigan actually seems to strike a pretty good balance: they are certainly not hurting for athletic funding, but they also devote sizeable chunks of their budget to research, medicine, and yes, even teaching. And unlike virtually all other varsity athletic programs, University of Michigan athletics turns a profit!)

If all the varsity athletics in the world suddenly disappeared… I’m not convinced we’d be any worse off, actually. We’d lose a source of entertainment, but it could probably be easily replaced by, say, Netflix. And universities could re-focus their efforts on academics, instead of acting like a free training and selection system for the pro leagues. The University of California, Irvine certainly seemed no worse off for its lack of varsity football. (Though I admit it felt a bit strange, even to a consummate nerd like me, to have a varsity League of Legends team.)

They keep making the experience of teaching worse and worse, even as they cut faculty salaries and make our jobs more and more precarious.

That might be what really made me most miserable, knowing how expendable I was to the university. If I hadn’t quit when I did, I would have been out after another semester anyway, and going through this same process a bit later. It wasn’t even that I was denied tenure; it was never on the table in the first place. And perhaps because they knew I wouldn’t stay anyway, they didn’t invest anything in mentoring or supporting me. Ostensibly I was supposed to be assigned a faculty mentor immediately; I know the first semester was crazy because of COVID, but after two and a half years I still didn’t have one. (I had a small research budget, which they reduced in the second year; that was about all the support I got. I used it—once.)

So if I do continue on that “academia” road, I’m going to need to do a lot of things differently. I’m not going to put up with a lot of things that I did. I’ll demand a long-term position—if not tenure-track, at least renewable indefinitely, like a lecturer position (as it is in the US, where the tenure-track position is called “assistant professor” and “lecturer” is permanent but not tenured; in the UK, “lecturers” are tenure-track—except at Oxford, and as of 2021, Cambridge—just to confuse you). Above all, I’ll only be applying to schools that actually have some track record for valuing teaching and supporting their faculty.

And if I can’t find any such positions? Then I just won’t apply at all. I’m not going in with the “I’ll take what I can get” mentality I had last time. Our household finances are stable enough that I can afford to wait awhile.

But maybe I won’t even do that. Maybe I’ll take a different path entirely.

For now, I just don’t know.

When to give up

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , ,

Jun 6 JDN 2459372

Perseverance is widely regarded as a virtue, and for good reason. Often one of the most important deciding factors in success is the capacity to keep trying after repeated failure. I think this has been a major barrier for me personally; many things came easily to me when I was young, and I internalized the sense that if something doesn’t come easily, it must be beyond my reach.

Yet it’s also worth noting that this is not the only deciding factor—some things really are beyond our capabilities. Indeed, some things are outright impossible. And we often don’t know what is possible and what isn’t.

This raises the question: When should we persevere, and when should we give up?

There is actually reason to think that people often don’t give up when they should. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame)recently published a study that asked people who were on the verge of a difficult decision to flip a coin, and then base their decision on the coin flip: Heads, make a change; tails, keep things as they are. Many didn’t actually follow the coin flip—but enough did that there was a statistical difference between those who saw heads and those who saw tails. The study found that the people who flipped heads and made a change were on average happier a couple of years later than the people who flipped tails and kept things as they were.

This question is particularly salient for me lately, because the academic job market has gone so poorly for me. I’ve spent most of my life believing that academia is where I belong; my intellect and my passion for teaching and research has convinced me and many others that this is the right path for me. But now that I have a taste of what it is actually like to apply for tenure-track jobs and submit papers to journals, I am utterly miserable. I hate every minute of it. I’ve spent the entire past year depressed and feeling like I have accomplished absolutely nothing.

In theory, once one actually gets tenure it’s supposed to get easier. But that could be a long way away—or it might never happen at all. As it is, there’s basically no chance I’ll get a tenure track position this year, and it’s unclear what my chances would be if I tried again next year.

If I could actually get a paper published, that would no doubt improve my odds of landing a better job next year. But I haven’t been able to do that, and each new rejection cuts so deep that I can barely stand to look at my papers anymore, much less actually continue submitting them. And apparently even tenured professors still get their papers rejected repeatedly, which means that this pain will never go away. I simply cannot imagine being happy if this is what I am expected to do for the rest of my life.

I found this list of criteria for when you should give up something—and most of them fit me. I’m not sure I know in my heart it can’t work out, but I increasingly suspect that. I’m not sure I want it anymore, now that I have a better idea of what it’s really like. Pursuing it is definitely making me utterly miserable. I wouldn’t say it’s the only reason, but I definitely do worry what other people will think if I quit; I feel like I’d be letting a lot of people down. I also wonder who I am without it, where I belong if not here. I don’t know what other paths are out there, but maybe there is something better. This constant stream of failure and rejection has definitely made me feel like I hate myself. And above all, when I imagine quitting, I absolutely feel an enormous sense of relief.

Publishing in journals seems to be the thing that successful academics care about most, and it means almost nothing to me anymore. I only want it because of all the pressure to have it, because of all the rewards that come from having it. It has become fully instrumental to me, with no intrinsic meaning or value. I have no particular desire to be lauded by the same system that lauded Fischer Black or Kenneth Rogoff—both of whose egregious and easily-avoidable mistakes are responsible for the suffering of millions people around the world.

I want people to read my ideas. But people don’t actually read journals. They skim them. They read the abstracts. They look at the graphs and regression tables. (You have the meeting that should have been an email? I raise you the paper that should have been a regression table.) They see if there’s something in there that they should be citing for their own work, and if there is, maybe then they actually read the paper—but everyone is so hyper-specialized that only a handful of people will ever actually want to cite any given paper. The vast majority of research papers are incredibly tedious to read and very few people actually bother. As a method for disseminating ideas, this is perhaps slightly better than standing on a street corner and shouting into a megaphone.

I would much rather write books; people sometimes actually read books, especially when they are written for a wide audience and hence not forced into the straitjacket of standard ‘scientific writing’ that no human being actually gets any enjoyment out of writing or reading. I’ve seen a pretty clear improvement in writing quality of papers written by Nobel laureates—after they get their Nobels or similar accolades. Once they establish themselves, they are free to actually write in ways that are compelling and interesting, rather than having to present everything in the most dry, tedious way possible. If your paper reads like something that a normal person would actually find interesting or enjoyable to read, you will be—as I have been—immediately told that you must remove all such dangerous flavor until the result is as tasteless as possible.

No, the purpose of research journals is not to share ideas. Its function is not to share, but to evaluate. And it isn’t even really to evaluate research—it’s to evaluate researchers. It’s to outsource the efforts of academic hiring to an utterly unaccountable and arbitrary system run mostly by for-profit corporations. It may have some secondary effect of evaluating ideas for validity; at least the really awful ideas are usually excluded. But its primary function is to decide the academic pecking order.

I had thought that scientific peer review was supposed to select for truth. Perhaps sometimes it does. It seems to do so reasonably well in the natural sciences, at least. But in the social sciences? That’s far less clear. Peer-reviewed papers are much more likely to be accurate than any randomly-selected content; but there are still a disturbingly large number of peer-reviewed published papers that are utterly wrong, and some unknown but undoubtedly vast number of good papers that have never seen the light of day.

Then again, when I imagine giving up on an academic career, I don’t just feel relief—I also feel regret and loss. I feel like I’ve wasted years of my life putting together a dream that has now crumbled in my hands. I even feel some anger, some sense that I was betrayed by those who told me that this was about doing good research when it turns out it’s actually about being thick-skinned enough that you can take an endless assault of rejections. It feels like I’ve been running a marathon, and I just rounded a curve to discover that the last five miles must be ridden on horseback, when I don’t have a horse, I have no equestrian training, and in fact I’m allergic to horses.

I wish someone had told me it would be like this. Maybe they tried and I didn’t listen. They did say that papers would get rejected. They did say that the tenure track was high-pressure and publish-or-perish was a major source of anxiety. But they never said that it would tear at my soul like this. They never said that I would have to go through multiple rounds of agony, self-doubt, and despair in order to get even the slighest recognition for my years of work. They never said that the whole field would treat me like I’m worthless because I can’t satisfy the arbitrary demands of a handful of anonymous reviewers. They never said that I would begin to feel worthless after several rounds of this.

That’s really what I want to give up on. I want to give up on hitching my financial security, my career, my future, my self-worth to a system as capricious as peer review.

I don’t want to give up on research. I don’t want to give up on teaching. I still believe strongly in discovering new truths and sharing them with others. I’m just increasingly realizing that academia isn’t nearly as good at that as I thought it was.

It isn’t even that I think it’s impossible for me to succeed in academia. I think that if I continued trying to get a tenure-track job, I would land one eventually. Maybe next year. Or maybe I’d spend a few years at a postdoc first. And I’d probably manage to publish some paper in some reasonably respectable journal at some point in the future. But I don’t know how long it would take, or how good a journal it would be—and I’m already past the point where I really don’t care anymore, where I can’t afford to care, where if I really allowed myself to care it would only devastate me when I inevitably fail again. Now that I see what is really involved in the process, how arduous and arbitrary it is, publishing in a journal means almost nothing to me. I want to be validated; I want to be appreciated; I want to be recognized. But the system is set up to provide nothing but rejection, rejection, rejection. If even the best work won’t be recognized immediately and even the worst work can make it with enough tries, then the whole system begins to seem meaningless. It’s just rolls of the dice. And I didn’t sign up to be a gambler.

The job market will probably be better next year than it was this year. But how much better? Yes, there will be more openings, but there will also be more applicants: Everyone who would normally be on the market, plus everyone like me who didn’t make it this year, plus everyone who decided to hold back this year because they knew they wouldn’t make it (as I probably should have done). Yes, in a normal year, I could be fairly confident of getting some reasonably decent position—but this wasn’t a normal year, and next year won’t be one either, and the one after that might still not be. If I can’t get a paper published in a good journal between now and then—and I’m increasingly convinced that I can’t—then I really can’t expect my odds to be greatly improved from what they were this time around. And if I don’t know that this terrible gauntlet is going to lead to something good, I’d really much rather avoid it altogether. It was miserable enough when I went into it being (over)confident that it would work out all right.

Perhaps the most important question when deciding whether to give up is this: What will happen if you do? What alternatives do you have? If giving up means dying, then don’t give up. (“Learn to let go” is very bad advice to someone hanging from the edge of a cliff.) But while it may feel that way sometimes, rarely does giving up on a career or a relationship or a project yield such catastrophic results.

When people are on the fence about making a change and then do so, even based on the flip of a coin, it usually makes them better off. Note that this is different from saying you should make all your decisions randomly; if you are confident that you don’t want to make a change, don’t make a change. This advice is for people who feel like they want a change but are afraid to take the chance, people who find themselves ambivalent about what direction to go next—people like me.

I don’t know where I should go next. I don’t know where I belong. I know it isn’t Wall Street. I’m pretty sure it’s not consulting. Maybe it’s nonprofits. Maybe it’s government. Maybe it’s freelance writing. Maybe it’s starting my own business. I guess I’d still consider working in academia; if Purdue called me back to say they made a terrible mistake and they want me after all, I’d probably take the offer. But since such an outcome is now vanishingly unlikely, perhaps it’s time, after all, to give up.

Social science is broken. Can we fix it?

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

May 16 JDN 2459349

Social science is broken. I am of course not the first to say so. The Atlantic recently published an article outlining the sorry state of scientific publishing, and several years ago Slate Star Codex published a lengthy post (with somewhat harsher language than I generally use on this blog) showing how parapsychology, despite being obviously false, can still meet the standards that most social science is expected to meet. I myself discussed the replication crisis in social science on this very blog a few years back.

I was pessimistic then about the incentives of scientific publishing be fixed any time soon, and I am even more pessimistic now.

Back then I noted that journals are often run by for-profit corporations that care more about getting attention than getting the facts right, university administrations are incompetent and top-heavy, and publish-or-perish creates cutthroat competition without providing incentives for genuinely rigorous research. But these are widely known facts, even if so few in the scientific community seem willing to face up to them.

Now I am increasingly concerned that the reason we aren’t fixing this system is that the people with the most power to fix it don’t want to. (Indeed, as I have learned more about political economy I have come to believe this more and more about all the broken institutions in the world. American democracy has its deep flaws because politicians like it that way. China’s government is corrupt because that corruption is profitable for many of China’s leaders. Et cetera.)

I know economics best, so that is where I will focus; but most of what I’m saying here would also apply to other social sciences such as sociology and psychology as well. (Indeed it was psychology that published Daryl Bem.)

Rogoff and Reinhart’s 2010 article “Growth in a Time of Debt”, which was a weak correlation-based argument to begin with, was later revealed (by an intrepid grad student! His name is Thomas Herndon.) to be based upon deep, fundamental errors. Yet the article remains published, without any notice of retraction or correction, in the American Economic Review, probably the most prestigious journal in economics (and undeniably in the vaunted “Top Five”). And the paper itself was widely used by governments around the world to justify massive austerity policies—which backfired with catastrophic consequences.

Why wouldn’t the AER remove the article from their website? Or issue a retraction? Or at least add a note on the page explaining the errors? If their primary concern were scientific truth, they would have done something like this. Their failure to do so is a silence that speaks volumes, a hound that didn’t bark in the night.

It’s rational, if incredibly selfish, for Rogoff and Reinhart themselves to not want a retraction. It was one of their most widely-cited papers. But why wouldn’t AER’s editors want to retract a paper that had been so embarrassingly debunked?

And so I came to realize: These are all people who have succeeded in the current system. Their work is valued, respected, and supported by the system of scientific publishing as it stands. If we were to radically change that system, as we would necessarily have to do in order to re-align incentives toward scientific truth, they would stand to lose, because they would suddenly be competing against other people who are not as good at satisfying the magical 0.05, but are in fact at least as good—perhaps even better—actual scientists than they are.

I know how they would respond to this criticism: I’m someone who hasn’t succeeded in the current system, so I’m biased against it. This is true, to some extent. Indeed, I take it quite seriously, because while tenured professors stand to lose prestige, they can’t really lose their jobs even if there is a sudden flood of far superior research. So in directly economic terms, we would expect the bias against the current system among grad students, adjuncts, and assistant professors to be larger than the bias in favor of the current system among tenured professors and prestigious researchers.

Yet there are other motives aside from money: Norms and social status are among the most powerful motivations human beings have, and these biases are far stronger in favor of the current system—even among grad students and junior faculty. Grad school is many things, some good, some bad; but one of them is a ritual gauntlet that indoctrinates you into the belief that working in academia is the One True Path, without which your life is a failure. If your claim is that grad students are upset at the current system because we overestimate our own qualifications and are feeling sour grapes, you need to explain our prevalence of Impostor Syndrome. By and large, grad students don’t overestimate our abilities—we underestimate them. If we think we’re as good at this as you are, that probably means we’re better. Indeed I have little doubt that Thomas Herndon is a better economist than Kenneth Rogoff will ever be.

I have additional evidence that insider bias is important here: When Paul Romer—Nobel laureate—left academia he published an utterly scathing criticism of the state of academic macroeconomics. That is, once he had escaped the incentives toward insider bias, he turned against the entire field.

Romer pulls absolutely no punches: He literally compares the standard methods of DSGE models to “phlogiston” and “gremlins”. And the paper is worth reading, because it’s obviously entirely correct. He pulls no punches and every single one lands on target. It’s also a pretty fun read, at least if you have the background knowledge to appreciate the dry in-jokes. (Much like “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” I still laugh out loud every time I read the phrase “hegemonic Zermelo-Frankel axioms”, though I realize most people would be utterly nonplussed. For the unitiated, these are the Zermelo-Frankel axioms. Can’t you just see the colonialist imperialism in sentences like “\forall x \forall y (\forall z, z \in x \iff z \in y) \implies x = y”?)

In other words, the Upton Sinclair Principle seems to be applying here: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon not understanding it.” The people with the most power to change the system of scientific publishing are journal editors and prestigious researchers, and they are the people for whom the current system is running quite swimmingly.

It’s not that good science can’t succeed in the current system—it often does. In fact, I’m willing to grant that it almost always does, eventually. When the evidence has mounted for long enough and the most adamant of the ancien regime finally retire or die, then, at last, the paradigm will shift. But this process takes literally decades longer than it should. In principle, a wrong theory can be invalidated by a single rigorous experiment. In practice, it generally takes about 30 years of experiments, most of which don’t get published, until the powers that be finally give in.

This delay has serious consequences. It means that many of the researchers working on the forefront of a new paradigm—precisely the people that the scientific community ought to be supporting most—will suffer from being unable to publish their work, get grant funding, or even get hired in the first place. It means that not only will good science take too long to win, but that much good science will never get done at all, because the people who wanted to do it couldn’t find the support they needed to do so. This means that the delay is in fact much longer than it appears: Because it took 30 years for one good idea to take hold, all the other good ideas that would have sprung from it in that time will be lost, at least until someone in the future comes up with them.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget it: At the AEA conference a few years back, I went to a luncheon celebrating Richard Thaler, one of the founders of behavioral economics, whom I regard as one of the top 5 greatest economists of the 20th century (I’m thinking something like, “Keynes > Nash > Thaler > Ramsey > Schelling”). Yes, now he is being rightfully recognized for his seminal work; he won a Nobel, and he has an endowed chair at Chicago, and he got an AEA luncheon in his honor among many other accolades. But it was not always so. Someone speaking at the luncheon offhandedly remarked something like, “Did we think Richard would win a Nobel? Honestly most of us weren’t sure he’d get tenure.” Most of the room laughed; I had to resist the urge to scream. If Richard Thaler wasn’t certain to get tenure, then the entire system is broken. This would be like finding out that Erwin Schrodinger or Niels Bohr wasn’t sure he would get tenure in physics.

A. Gary Schilling, a renowned Wall Street economist (read: One Who Has Turned to the Dark Side), once remarked (the quote is often falsely attributed to Keynes): “markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent.” In the same spirit, I would say this: the scientific community can remain wrong a lot longer than you and I can extend our graduate fellowships and tenure clocks.