Posts filed under ‘Ephemera’
Are Reviewers Too Powerful?
| Nicolai Foss|
Reviewers certainly are powerful. Are they too powerful?
When I served as Departmental Editor of the Journal of International Business Studies it occassionally happened that I issued invitations to revise and resubmit , against the advice of the reviewers. I often accepted papers for publication that at least one and sometimes two reviewers hated. Once it happened that after I had accepted such a paper, a very dissatisfied reviewer — a prominent Wharton scholar — wrote to the chief editor, complaining that I was undermining the refereeing institution. Well, I thought the reviewer was wrong and that I (and the author) was right. And I thought I had no obligation to slavishly follow his advice, which was just that, a piece of advice, and not a verdict. (more…)
The O&M Readership is Expanding
| Nicolai Foss |
We have been suspecting it for a long time, but now it is an established fact: We have an expanding celebrity readership. Here is a series of nice pics of an O&M celebrity reader preparing to post a comment on a Nicolai Foss strategic management post. Now we only need to get Salma to live up to that surname …
Silly Things Nobel Prize Winners Say
| Nicolai Foss |
It is comforting to us ordinary mortals that Nobel Prize winners in economics have contributed their share of nonsense. Here at O&M we hope to make the Silly Things etc. post a regularly occurring feature. Today’s quotation is from Douglass C. North’s recent Understanding the Process of Economic Change (2005: 122):
Economists of a libertarian persuasion have for some time labored under the delusion that there is something called laissez faire and that once there are in place “efficient” property rights and the rule of law the economy will perform well without further adjustment. The scandals involving Enron, Dynergy, WorldCom, and others in 2001-2002 should have laid such a delusion to rest.
Nicolai’s Secret Life
| Peter Klein |
My co-blogger claims to be a hard-nosed, logical, anti-postmodern realist, but guess what? He has secretly authored a book — in German, no less! — on “Women Who Changed the World,” profiles of feminist intellectuals and activists such as Virginia Woolf, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Bertha von Suttner, and Ellen Key. Here’s the proof. Perhaps he thought by writing the book in German, as Frauen, die die Welt verändern, we wouldn’t find out. Nice try, Nicolai!
Oh, wait, never mind, this is actually an Amazon.co.uk database error. The real author is Katharina Kaminski. (Or is that a pseudonym?)
Teaching Evaluations: Nationality Discounts and Premia?
| Nicolai Foss |
As is, I suppose, the case with most of the readers of this blog, I am subject to the discipline of student evaluations. I tend to find them pretty useless because their information content is rather low and because the whole process is very noisy and biased, although I do admit that they are a powerful tool for getting rid of teachers who are placed at the left tail of the quality distribution (let me anticipate a possible misunderstanding: I am usually rated in the opposite end of the distribution).
Here is a possible example of bias: I have often observed, and so have many colleagues with whom I have discussed the matter, what seems to be a nationality premium. (more…)
Announcing the New O&M Guest Blogger: Lasse Lien
| Nicolai Foss |
Peter and I are privileged to have been joined here at O&M by some magnificent guest bloggers, first Joe Mahoney and currently Dick Langlois. We will soon be joined by an additional guest blogger, namely Associate Professor Lasse Lien, PhD, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, no doubt one of the smartest (and nicest) Norwegian business administration scholars
Lasse is a friend of Peter and I. Peter has written a series of fine papers with Lasse, all on aspects of diversification. These have their root in Lasse’s PhD thesis on which I was lucky to serve as a supervisor and which he defended in 2004. I am also a colleague with Lasse at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.
Lasse’s main interest is empirical research practice (don’t expect too many blog posts on cultural conservatism, Misesian praxeology or Lockian/Rothbardian self-ownership from him). He has already announced that he has something provocative in store. We look forward to it, and welcome him at O&M.
Academic Insults: Gordon Tullock Edition
| Peter Klein |
Nicolai recently started a thread on academic insults. Alex Tabarrok has created one exclusively for insults delivered by Gordon Tullock, a legendary put-down artist. To wit:
“Gordon,” I asked, “do you think we should ban child labor?” “No, keep working.”
The other day Gordon asked me to read one of his papers and I pointed out a few typos. “Excellent,” he said, “this will surely be your greatest contribution to economics.”
Gordon is prone to pressing people with difficult questions. One of my colleagues responded, “Gordon, I’m not that good at thinking on my feet.” Without missing a beat Gordon pulled up a chair and said “well sit down and we’ll see how you do then.”
Bob Lawson adds this one:
After going through the model and somewhat apologetically presenting my results which didn’t show what the model predicted. Gordon says to me, “That’s ok, Bob, a lot of other people haven’t found that result either.”
I Know Just What You Mean
| Peter Klein |
Headline of the day, from newsvine.com:
Redmond: FOSS makes our brain hurt
(Actually FOSS here means Free Open-Source Software and the story’s about Microsoft. But it could have just as easily been about Foss.)
“Critical” This and “Critical” That
| Nicolai Foss |
At the ongoing Academy of Management Meetings there are a number of sessions with titles such as “Critical Perspectives on Power in Organizations.” Of course, we all know that “critical” is a code-word for left-leaning (often extremely so) work on the issues with which social science deals, in the traditions of mainly European lefty and muzzy sociologists and philosophers, such as Foucault, Habermas, etc.
Still, I am somewhat disturbed that a scholarly organization, such as the AoM, can accept session titles of these kind. The clear implication of these kind of titles is that the rest of us, who may also be interested in, say, “power in organizations,” are not really critical — which to me means that we are not serious scholars. That implication is evidently preposterous, particularly given the low level of scholarship that often characterizes so-called “critical studies,” including those in management.
Airport Security Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
From Chris Westley: “Every time I take off my shoes in the security screening process at the airport, I find it consoling to remind myself that at least Richard Reid wasn’t wearing an underwear bomb.”
Update: Civil libertarians warn that new passenger screening technologies might as well be underwear searches.
Why Are Terrorists More Inventive Than Cops?
| Nicolai Foss |
National Review Online has an interesting symposium, “Plans Destroyed,” on yesterday’s terror plot (which caused me to spend 3 hours in the airport here in Atlanta; well, perhaps not the worst way to spend your time in Atlanta ;-)). Daniel Pipes offers his reflections, arguing that
Airplanes represent an outdated target because passenger screening techniques quickly adapt to threats. As soon as terrorists implement new techniques (box-cutters, shoe-bombs, liquid components), security promptly blocks them … Conversely, trains, subways, and buses, as shown by attacks in Madrid, London, and Bombay, offer far richer opportunities for terrorists, for access to them can never be so strictly controlled as to aircraft.
Indeed; but as he points out himself terrorists do target planes, and “One cannot but wonder, however, why creatively, cops invariably lag behind criminals.” Pipes is surely not the first to make this observation; however, as far as I know nobody has tried to seriously answer it.
One answer may be that criminals are smarter than cops. For petty criminals that is probably very far from the truth. For terrorists it may come a bit closer to the truth: Many of today’s terrorists are likely to be better educated than many, perhaps most, cops. Still, intelligence agencies have, of course, highly educated experts employed.
Rather than a capability explanation, the explanation may turn on incentives/property rights. Intelligence officers are government bureaucrats with twarthed incentives to think ahead of highly motivated terrorists (even if their motivation is wholly derived from the expectation of other-worldly rewards). Career ladders may, perhaps, provide incentives, but these are extremely blunt. May this be an argument for privatizing intelligence services?
Yet More on Economists and Sociologists
| Peter Klein |
Adding more fuel to the fire are Gordon Smith and Larry Solom. Best line, from Gordon: “Economists just assume sociologists are stupid because that improves the r-squared of the economists’ world view.” (Via Brayden.)
The 50th Anniversary of a (Forgotten?) Classic
| Nicolai Foss |
50 years ago Don Patinkin’s Money, Interest, and Prices: An Integration of Monetary and Value Theory was published. This is one of those relatively rare books that has both been widely used as a textbook (when I began studying economics at the University of Copenhagen in 1983, it was still used as an advanced textbook in monetary theory) and as a standard reference in the relevant field (another example could be Scherer’s Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance).
These days, the book is probably only being read by aging specialists in monetary theory, and Patinkin is not likely to be a name that is known to many modern economists (cf. Peter’s terrifying story of professional ignorance). And yet, the list of the accomplishment’s of Money, Interest, and Prices is extremely impressive (cf. this paper by Olivier Blanchard). Thus, the book clarified the meaning of Say’s law, Walras’ Law, the classical dichotomy, the value theory vs monetary theory issue, and the the loanable funds vs. liquidity preference issue in ways that have been generally accepted ever since.
A personal note: I met Patinkin in 1987 at a conference in honour of John Hicks in Aalborg. I was still a student then, and remember asking him some pretty silly questions. However, he was extremely nice and invited me to dinner the same evening in a local restaurant. When I arrived he was seated with Robert Clower and Axel Leijonhufvud! Edmund Phelps later joined. Only time I have ever been so close to so many celebrities.
It Was Only a Matter of Time
| Peter Klein |
We professors know that students, not faculty, hold the real power at universities. (They get ratemyprofessors.com; we get the rather feeble, though cathartic, Rate Your Students.) So this was only a matter of time.
Econ Superblogs
| Peter Klein |
These econ blogs get mentioned by The Economist in “The Invisible Hand on the Keyboard”: DeLong, Becker-Posner, Mankiw, and Setser. (According to Technorati, the top five econ blogs are Beppe Grillo, Crooked Timber, Marginal Revolution, The Long Tail, and Professor Bainbridge.)
Why do economists blog? Mostly for fun, and also to increase one’s professional influence, say The Economist’s celebrity bloggers. Here at O&M, we do it to make the world a better place. Really.
Update: Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin has a chapter (not available online, unfortunately) on economics blogs in a new book, Uses of Blogs.
Update 2: Brad DeLong explains econ blogging in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (See also his comment below.)
Ignorance is Bliss, Among Economists
| Peter Klein |
Everyone knows that economists tend to be woefully uninformed about the history of their discipline. But one can still be surprised. At a recent luncheon I was seated next to an editor of one of the leading field journals in economics. This journal publishes mainstream, fairly technical articles in its specialty area and is quite highly ranked by the usual measures. The luncheon speaker was Kenneth Arrow.
The journal editor literally did not know who Arrow was. He recognized the name, and had a vague idea that Arrow was someone important, but could not name even one general area in which Arrow worked (general-equilibrium theory, information economics, social choice, etc.).
I resisted the temptation to ask if he’d heard of Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
Unusual Business Ideas That Work
| Peter Klein |
See Uncommon Business for interesting examples of entrepreneurial creativity. (Via Craig Depken)
Frontiers of Shirking, via Scott Adams
| Peter Klein |
Nicolai and I have written on the tradeoff between productive and destructive “entrepreneurial” behavior by employees. Decentralization and incentive compensation can increase effort, foster creativity, and facilitate more effective use of dispersed, specific knowledge. On the other hand, employee empowerment allows for shirking, rent-seeking, and other behaviors that reduce firm value. (See, for example, this paper.)
Who better to chronicle the newest and most creative forms of shirking than Dilbert creator Scott Adams? Here are his ten tips for looking busy, from the August issue of Wired: (more…)
Capitalism, Socialism, and the Cote d’Azur
| Richard Langlois |
Thanks to Nicolai and Peter for inviting me to join in on the fun.
I trust that Nicolai and family are enjoying their vacation in Antibes, soaking up the sun and t
he local communist ideology. As it happens, I was in that part of the world about a month ago. On a free day while exploring Nice, I headed up to Nice Castle in search of some medieval ambience. Instead I found the annual local fete of the French Communist Party. The experience was surreal in that the event reminded me of nothing so much as the small-town agricultural fairs here in New England. The main difference seemed to be that the booths offering grilled sausages were staffed not by the Columbia Lions Club but by the Pablo Picasso Cell. (I must admit, however, that, even though the towns near me have names like Hebron and Lebanon, none of them would have had a pro-Palestinian anti-Israeli booth.) Adding to the surreal experience, the sound system kept pumping out Steely Dan’s “Cousin Dupree” over and over, apparently as a way of checking the settings.
I was in Nice — actually Sophia Antipolis, which is closer to Antibes — for the biennial meeting of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society. This was a rather more capitalistic experience, at least from my point of view. For one thing, the conference dinner, which featured the award of the Schumpeter Prize, took place at a former Rothschild Villa overlooking the sea. As a certain modicum of self promotion is apparently de rigeur in blogs, I suppose I should admit that one of the winners of the Schumpeter Prize was, well, me. The manuscript in question, called The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy, started out as the Graz Schumpeter Lectures in 2004. (In this respect I followed in the footsteps of Brian Loasby, whose 1996 Graz Lectures won the 2000 Schumpeter Prize.) The book (which Routledge is to publish) mixes intellectual history and economic history, tracing the (remarkably similar) Weberian accounts of Schumpeter and Chandler, who see the large managerial corporation as the apotheosis of “rational” economic organization, and confronting those accounts with the rather contrary evidence of the last quarter century — what I call the Vanishing Hand thesis. At least until I sign the rights over to Routledge, the manuscript is available here.
More substance next time.
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