Thread by @oliverbeige

So to conclude this little survey, (US) Econ doesn't only lack minorities and women, it lacks freaks, outsiders, historians, anthropologists. It's turned into this little efficiency machine that churns out technically gifted emptyheads bc that's what the market wants.

https://twitter.com/Econ_Marshall/status/1083430276628430848

At the same time stoking this utterly inefficient human Google for economic insight that's increasingly behaving like a clogged filter and that's generously rewarding the gatekeepers who in turn don't even do the basic tasks of sifting and sorting well.

One of the most fundamental insights of economics is that things start slowly until they run well until they run really well until the stop working so well until they don't work at all. This is Malthus, this is Kuhn, this is Schumpeter, this is basic theory of production.

Somehow along the way of its own success path this little efficiency machine has become so efficient that it forgot to put this fundamental insight into those little technically gifted emptyheads it churns out.

🧐

Ironically, this is exactly how the cybernetics movement died. An efficiency machine that became so obsessed with its own efficiency that it ran itself into the ground.

Via @SandyDarity:
"The Desegregation of an Elite Economics Department’s PhD Program: Black Americans at MIT" — William Darity Jr. and Arden Kreeger