Thread by @JakeVigdor

"Brilliant answers to irrelevant questions: a game for anti-social social scientists"

Is that what economists are playing now?

An epistemological concern with roots as old as the discipline itself.

And our thread for today.

https://twitter.com/christopherruhm/status/1075960649568714752

We'll start off with enough links to keep you busy all weekend:
@christopherruhm's recent paper nber.org/papers/w25320
@oren_cass on the politicization of research nationalaffairs.com/publications/d…
A critique in a journal lots of non-economists read: nature.com/articles/d4158…

A critique from @MartinRavallion:
cgdev.org/publication/sh…
And @DeirdreMcClosk, of course. Not just this link.
deirdremccloskey.org/articles/stats…

As for new content, let me show you some interesting pictures based on a fabulous tool created by my @UW colleagues @jevinwest and @CT_Bergstrom,

Addressing the question: when economists speak, is anyone else listening?

Behold this image. It portrays the top academic journals across fields. Color-coding identifies "clusters." Social science occupies the peach-toned square in the lower left. Size of any journal's square is a function of impact: citations to articles published in it.

Click on any square (link appears later in the thread) and you get a map of citations to & from that journal. So here's JACS, the top journal for chemistry (aside from Science/Nature/PNAS).

White: that journal cites the ref. journal
Black arrow: journal is cited by the ref. j.

Chemists have a nice dialogue going not just with other chemists, but physicists, biologists, astronomers, medical research, and so forth.

Social science not so much. That's why the peach square is greyed out.

So what does this look like if you click on an econ journal?

Here's the AER.

Lots of cross-talk with the other econ journals (left side of the peach square)
Occasionally cited in the pink bio/med/gen science sector
Look at the black whiskers on the right of the peach box. AER articles cite other soc sci journals but aren't cited in them.

Here's REStud. One of our vaunted "top 5" journals.

It ignores, and is in turn ignored, by virtually every journal outside economics. Including the other social sciences.

Journal of Labor Economics? A highly selective top field journal?

Also ignored by virtually every journal outside economics. There are some black whiskers over by sociology, but again that's labor economists citing soc articles. Sociologists aren't returning our calls.

The sociologists? We're citing them at least occasionally. As are psychologists, political scientists, and occasional papers in Science, Nature, and PNAS.

Note more white whiskers than black here. Maybe it means sociologists should listen more. But they're being heard.

Psychologists? They've got lots of connections. They light up the neuroscience cluster, medical journals, sociology, management. Economics not so much.

Here's political science. Some cross-talk with the other social sciences and a wee bit with general science. But also a preponderance of black whiskers, kind of like the econ journals.

OK, thank you for your patience, here's the link. Warning: you may find yourself spending a lot of time perusing these fascinating visualizations!

well-formed.eigenfactor.org

So why does this matter? Can't we just happily talk amongst ourselves?

Scholars in all disciplines are primarily rewarded by communicating within the discipline.

The fate of discipline, however, depends critically on its ability to communicate with the rest of the world.

If economists aren't delivering insights of value to the rest of the academy, then maybe we've gone too far into the weeds.

Or maybe we just can't communicate our insights in language that others understand.

In a world where the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines are eroding, where there's enough room for very distinct subfields of both "biochemistry" and "chemical biology," economics is the wallflower at the cocktail party.