Archive for 17 December 2008
Mainstream Journalism, RIP
| Peter Klein |
Last week’s WSJ carried an op-ed from SEC Chair Christopher Cox, “We Need a Bailout Exit Strategy.” The op-ed was nothing special (mostly defending the SEC, of course, though there was a nice Hayekian line about “decentralized decision-making, in which millions of independent economic actors make judgments using their own money, [resulting] in the wisest allocation of scarce resources across our complex society”). What caught my eye was the headline, which suggests a connection between the bailout and the Iraq war, a connection I’ve been meaning to write about.
Remember how journalists felt deceived by the Bush Administration about the war? President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and growing threat,” and the media repeated this line. Colin Powell showed pictures of the mobile weapons trailers and the New York Times reprinted them with enthusiasm. When the Administration’s claims proved false, the mea culpas began. Judith Miller resigned in disgrace. Never again, the media cried, will we be used as house propaganda organs. And yet, once the financial crisis began, the exact pattern was repeated. Bernanke and Paulson say there’s a “credit freeze,” that the financial sector is on the verge of collapse, that they alone know what to do — so that’s what the newspapers print. No time to investigate, to interview anyone outside the government, to hold these claims up to any critical scrutiny. If high officials say credit markets are frozen, that only “bold action” from the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress can prevent total meltdown, then that’s the way it is. Virtually every news report on the crisis followed the official script. It’s as if the financial reporters from the Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. were embedded with the Treasury. News reports have been little more than government press conferences. Shame, journalists, shame!
Why Oh Why, as Brad DeLong would say, can’t we have a press corps that investigates, rather than simply repeating what the government asserts?
Bygrave on the State of Entrepreneurship Research
| Peter Klein |
William Bygrave surveys the field and concludes that it’s “dominated by quantitative research driven almost exclusively by statistical analysis with SPSS and that qualitative research is seldom published in the leading entrepreneurship journals. He regrets that it is almost impossible to get purely empirical paper published in the leading journal. He pleads with journal editors and their review boards to become less narrow minded and much more pluralistic.”
Bygrave’s assessment is valuable but I think limited by its focus on the “traditional” entrepreneurship journals (e.g., JBV, ETP, SBE). Newer journals such as the SEJ and, more important, the entrepreneurship research that increasingly appears in the top mainstream strategy, organization, and economics journals tends to have a different, and more varied, character.
Ability and Specialization Among Economic Researchers
| Peter Klein |
Forgive the navel-gazing, but some of you may enjoy Todd Kendall’s paper in the December 2008 issue of MDE, “Ability and Specialization Among Economic Researchers,” which looks at the relationship between a researcher’s human capital and the scope of his activities. The sample consists of academic economists at top-50 US universities. Kendall shows that economists from more prestigious PhD programs tend to publish in more general journals, controlling for quality, and to list more JEL subject codes per paper. The quality control is important because the most prestigious journals (as in most fields) are also the most general. But the sample includes prestigious specialty journals and lower-tier general journals.
Naturally I’m tempted to ask for the raw data so I can analyze some sub-samples containing people I know personally. But perhaps it’s better not to go there. I do plan to defend myself against charges of being “eclectic” or “unfocused” by referring to this study and calling myself a “distinguished generalist.” At least it avoids Rothbard’s Law.
Organizations and Markets 
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