A question that people ask sometimes is, "What is your favorite paper in topic X written since y?"
It recently struck me that the reason I don't ever give a good answer is that it's a bit like the question, "What is your favorite beam in this building?"
It seeks assessment at the wrong level, both in terms of how most of us experience science, and in terms of what's important for its progress.
But it can take a while to see that!
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This was inspired by this @KevinZollman thread, which I like a lot because it says a similar thing at a different level (and in a different field).
(Although my analogy wouldn't come close to passing muster with a philosopher. Not all papers do the same sort of work as beams, a building comes about very differently from how a body of knowledge does, etc.)
β’ β’ β’
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This lovely paper by @SNageebAli, Mihm, and Siga β just revised for Econometrica β proposed a really striking theory of when voters rationally, but wrongly, think that policies are bad for them if they're good for others.
The paper has had a long childhood β I remember first seeing it in 2017 and finding the core adverse selection mechanism remarkable and compelling.
(Check out this study in abstract length, @ShengwuLi ! )
Hope it gets the attention it deserves in political economy.
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PS/
Scott Aaronson once defined an important theoretical idea as one that is hard to ignore in future discussions of the issue (in this case, zero-sum thinking), and I think by that standard, this is an important idea.
In the WSJ, Steven Landsburg proudly used this brain teaser to make an argument about where economics teaching is going wrong.
Instead he illustrates whatβs wrong with his way of doing price theory: sloppy economic thinking, way more impressed with itself than it deserves to be.
It's worth thinking through the "answer" he expects, which you can guess based only on knowing his personality (never great):
marginal cost of the fruit is lower for the monopolist. He writes, "In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs."
Let's forgive the obvious incoherence of βin a competitive industry.β His answer is very bad even so.
What will happen to the profit of the monopoly? In the actual world, some of it will be invested in the capital markets, where it might support resource-intensive production.
The notion that amazing papers should not get rejected is an odd one.
Any genuinely important idea is more likely to be strongly disliked. (Some reasons below in a short thread.)
To publish important work, editors have to be bold and overrule some negative experts.
Non-exhaustive list of reasons
1. The first technical work in a new paradigm is often crude and simple relative to the sophisticated and elaborate papers written late in a paradigm, when methods are being polished by a large community of experts in those methods.
2. Good ideas are often counterintuitive and have obvious drawbacks. They often prove valuable mainly through their later consequences.
Experts see the reasons not to pursue the counterintuitive paths: often, they have thought about and rejected these paths themselves before.