Posts filed under ‘Methods/Methodology/Theory of Science’
Undisputed Knowledge
| Lasse Lien |
Someone recently had the nerve to ask me for examples of undisputed knowledge generated from the social sciences. I.e., things we “know” that are both uncontroversial and does not require a lot of assumptions that are themselves in dispute (or not always true). . . .
I must admit that it was surprisingly (embarrassingly) difficult to come up with something that would qualify a strict interpretation of these criteria. Drawing a blank and under pressure to save face, I suggested that perhaps there would be universal agreement that there is nothing we can universally agree on. But then I realized that this would be an example of the liars paradox. I mean, it’s a logical impossibility that we can all agree that we cannot agree on anything.
So I guess my heroic defense of the social sciences boiled down to the claim that we can agree on only one thing, which unfortunately is a logical impossibility. . . .
Halo Alert
| Peter Klein |
Phil Rosenzweig’s excellent Halo Effect takes to task the typical “guru” book in business, one that picks a few successful companies, describes their business practices, and attributes success to those practies, without any attempt to design a “controlled experiment.” As I wrote last year:
The most common problems are sampling on the dependent variable (i.e., choosing a sample of high-performing companies and explaining what their managers did, ignoring selection bias) and using independent variables based purely on respondents’ ex post subjective assessments of strategy, corporate culture, leadership, and other “soft” characteristics. The latter is the “Halo Effect” of the book’s title. When a company’s financial or operating performance is strong, managers, consultants, journalists, and management professors tend to rate strategy, culture, and leadership highly, while rating the same strategies, cultures, and leadership poorly when a company’s performance is weak. It’s as if the authors of “guru” books have never taken a first-year graduate course on empirical research design. Or, as Rosenzweig puts it (p. 128): “None of these studies is likely to win a blue ribbon at your local high school science fair.” Ouch.
Look for a series of Halo-style analyses of the Presidential contest. Today’s NY Times, for example, contains a lengthy profile of the Obama campaign, “Near-Flawless Run Is Credited in Victory,” which recapitulates the Obama campaign’s hodge-podge of tactics, some good and some bad, without trying to isolate and identify the effects of particular tactics. The writers note that Obama’s chief strategists, David Axelrod and David Plouffe, have never before been involved with a successful campaign, which right away makes you wonder how “flawless” their strategy could have been. Still, the Times describes almost everything the campaign did as exactly right. Had Obama lost, no doubt the same pundits would be calling the same hodge-podge of tactics an obvious failure, placing the blaime on Alexrod and Plouffe and praising the McCain campaign’s own strategy and tactics. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc!
Economic Notes From the Underground
| Peter Klein |
An interesting call for proposals from EconJournalWatch:
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground (1864) is a classic of introspection and confession. The symposium takes its title from Dostoevsky’s work.
The prospective symposium will consist of confessional essays by economists about their existence as economists. Only genuine narrative and sincere reflection are welcome. However, essays may be anonymous.
Here are the kinds of confessions the editors have in mind:
- Building models one does not really believe to be useful or relevant.
- Making simplifications that obscure or omit important things.
- Using data one does not really believe in.
- Focusing on the statistical significance of one’s findings while quietly doubting economic significance.
- Engaging in data mining.
- Drawing “policy implications” that one knows are inappropriate or misleading.
- Keeping the discourse “between the 40 yard lines” so as to avoid being outspoken; knowingly eliding fundamental issues.
- Tilting the flavor of policy judgments to make a paper more acceptable to referees, editors, publishers, or funders.
- Disguising one’s methodological or ideological views, such as by omitting revealing activities or publications from one’s vitae.
- For government, institute, or corporate economists: Having to significantly play along with things one does not believe in.
My reaction: Can a single symposium issue possibly hold them all?
Essays on Cournot
| Peter Klein |
Martin Shubik reviews Jean-Philippe Touffut’s edited volume Augustin Cournot: Modelling Economics (Elgar, 2007) for EH.Net. Contributors deal with Cournot’s contributions to economics, probability theory, and statistics, with mixed results (according to Shubik, who thinks Cournot’s contributions to game theory deserved more ink). Shubik thinks Cournot was “not only was a mathematician and probabilist, he was an excellent modeler linking the economic world with basic abstract models . . . [particularly the] modeling and application of a mutually consistent expectations model to oligopoly and economic competition.”
Shubik opens the review with this interesting (if a touch immodest) anecdote:
In the early 1950s, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, I had two academic heroes. They were Cournot and Edgeworth (in my lesser Pantheon were Jevons and Walras). As soon as John Nash discussed his thesis on noncooperative games with me, I pointed out to him that his solution which was mathematically highly general was in essence the one that Cournot had applied to economics and had presented in his great book of 1838. The solution called for individual mutually consistent expectations. At that time game theory in either cooperative or noncooperative form was virtually ignored in economics. It seemed to me that this natural extension of Cournot, whose work was unknown to Nash, was going to extend the scope of oligopolistic studies considerably. Nash and I were joined by John Mayberry in writing an article accepted by _Econometrica_ (“A Comparison of Treatments of a Duopoly Situation,” 1953, 141-54.) This, I believe was the first treatment of oligopoly expanding on Cournot’s work utilizing modern game theory. The mathematical tools were being forged to expand vastly the noncooperative equilibrium methods to economics so brilliantly started by Cournot.
In his introduction to Menger’s Principles Hayek expresses surprise that Menger, unlike Jevons and Walras, seemed unfamiliar with Cournot.
Call for Papers: Org Economics and Org Capabilities
| Nicolai Foss |
The relation between organizational economics (agency theory, TCE, property rights theory, team theory) and the organizational capabilities view has often been debated on O&M. Perhaps not surprising, as at least three out of the four current O&M bloggers have frequently covered this theme in their research, Dick Langlois writing about the relation between these ideas at least as early as 1984 (here), my first publication on the subject appearing in 1993 (here), and Peter’s first paper on it appearing in 1996 (here). I think we hold different views on the nature of the relation between organizational economics and capabilities ideas. I increasingly think of ideas on transaction costs, property rights etc. as primary to, and more fundamental than, notions of capabilities (e.g., see this paper, forthcoming in Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal). Dick, on the other hand, seems to hold the opposite view.
Such differences are even more pronounced in the strategy and organization fields. Some scholars reject organizational economic altogether (Sid Winter seems close to that position). Others argue that organizational economics and the organizational economics view are complementary in an additive sense: They deal with different, yet complementary issues, so that, for example, the organizational capabilities view tells us which assets/resources we need, organizational economics providing insight in the actual organization of those assets/resources (this seems to be the current mainstream view). Some scholars go further, and argue that there is a real scope for integrating, for example, ideas on localized knowledge and learning from the capabilities view with transaction cost economics (e.g., this paper). In fact, overall there seems to have been some movement from the i initial polarized positions of 10-15 years to today’s more integrative stance.
In order to report advances in research on the relation between organizational economics and the organizational capabilities view, Nick Argyres, Teppo Felin, Todd Zenger and I will edit a special issue of Organization Science on “Organizational Economics and Organizational Capabilities: From Opposition and Complementarity to Real Integration.” Papers which can be both theoretical (or, for the US audience, “conceptual”) and empirical, must be submitted between Oct. 1 and Oct. 30 2009. The Call for Papers is here (scroll down a bit). The Call contains a long list of possible themes for papers, but feel free to mail me at njf.smg@cbs.dk (or any of the other editors) if you are in doubt whether your paper may make a fit with the SI.
A Critique of Modern Law and Economics Research
| Peter Klein |
From Eric Engle. How can I not link to a paper with “Theoretical Puffery” in the title? (Thanks to Mark Thornton for the pointer.)
Law and Economics: Theoretical Puffery, Exaggerated Claims and Counterfactual Models
Eric Engle
Universität Bremen; Harvard University – Berkman Center for Internet & SocietySeptember 15, 2008
Economic analyses of law predominate in the United States because they can claim to be objective and scientific thus verifiable and the basis of predictions and reproducible experiments. However, several of the claims of economic analysis of law go too far and are entirely unrealistic. This explains why economic analysis of law has not been taken up outside of the U.S. to the extent it has in the U.S. This article points out the unrealistic presumptions within law and economics theory (homo economicus and efficient markets, mostly) and the unrealistic claims of law and economics (that the law is and should be a mirror of the economy). Economic analysis of law cannot and should not serve as a general basis of legal decision making. However, as a special theory applicable as a method for determining certain issues economic methods can well inform legal decision making helping judges to shape justice correctly. This article exposes the competing schools within law and economics and presents a defensible version of economic methodology applied within legal discourse.
Government Funding and the Economic Organization of Scienctific Research
| Peter Klein |
A prominent climate scientist, Richard Lindzen of MIT, argues that the politicization of climate science over the last decade is but a symptom of a larger, more general problem caused by government science funding: namely an emphasis on demonstrable results that satisfy the public and have “practical” implications, rather than the pursuit of scientific truth (via Sean Corrigan).
For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former. Whereas the former had the potential for convergence, the latter is much less effective. The institutional factor has many components. One is the inordinate growth of administration in universities and the consequent increase in importance of grant overhead. This leads to an emphasis on large programs that never end. Another is the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of ‘carrots and sticks’ whereby reputations are made and broken. The above factors are all amplified by the need for government funding. When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research. This paper will deal with the origin of the cultural changes and with specific examples of the operation and interaction of these factors. In particular, we will show how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of.
The paper is well worth reading by social scientists and organization theorists. Business-school faculty will recognize the parallels with the call for “relevance” in management education (see the links in Teppo’s recent post). And there are important connections to the arts and humanities; recent scholarship, for example, challenges the notion that public funding produces better art (painting, music, literature, drama) than patronage or commercial funding (Cantor, Cowen, Scherer). Some readers may respond, with Pilate, “What is truth?” Somebody has to pay the bills, in other words, and that party will want something in return. (more…)
29 September 2008 at 10:17 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment
Mankiw: Defer to the Philosopher-Kings
| Peter Klein |
One of the most disappointing economist responses to the proposed bailout is Greg Mankiw’s. While not exactly endorsing the Paulson-Bernanke plan itself, Greg supports the process through which it emerged. His argument, essentially, is this: Paulson and Bernanke are very smart and have access to better information than the rest of us, so we should stop complaining and go along with whatever they propose.
I find this stunningly naive, for four reasons:
1. It ignores differences in theoretical frameworks or models. No doubt Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Oskar Lange, Paul Samuelson, and Joseph Stiglitz were or are highly intelligent people. Do we have to accept all their policy conclusions? Surely intelligent specialists can come to different conclusions not only because they have access to different information (the Friedmanite view), but because they have different understandings of how the world works. (This is especially true when long-run, rule-utilitarian consequences are at stake.)
2. It ignores the distinction between theoretical and applied economics. Even if people agree on theoretical questions, they may disagree on the application of theory to specific historical situations, which is a matter of judgment, not intelligence.
3. It ignores private interests. Paulson and Bernanke are not disinterested, Platonic philosopher-kings pursing the common good. Presumably they are pursuing private interests, just like every other political actor. Has Greg never heard of public choice?
4. It ignores concerns other than economic efficiency. Economists, like everyone else, have normative opinions. Some may oppose the bailout not on utilitarian grounds, but because they think giving taxpayer dollars to failing enterprises is immoral, regardless of possible contagion effects.
Testing for Bias in Peer Review
| Peter Klein |
In a working paper entitled “Can We Test for Bias in Scientific Peer Review?”, Andrew Oswald proposes a method of detecting whether journal editors (and the peer review process generally, I suppose) discriminate against certain kinds of authors. His approach, in a nutshell, is to look for discrepancies between the editor’s comparison of two papers and how those papers were ultimately compared by the scholarly community (based on citations). In tests he runs on two high-ranking American economics journals, he doesn’t find a bias by QJE editors against authors from England or Europe (or in favor of Harvard authors), but he does find that JPE editors appear to discriminate against their Chicago colleagues.
That’s Andy Eggers, writing in the Social Science Statistics Blog. As Andy points out, it’s not completely clear what (raw) citation counts, and hence the experiment itself, are measuring. Also, Oswald uses within-journal paper order as a signal of the editor’s assessment of quality. Still, the technique is interesting, particularly if being the “lead paper” of a top journal generates additional citations, independent of paper quality.
(From the You Can’t Win department: I once had a colleague who had published two or three papers in the JPE, but these papers weren’t highly cited, which the department counted as a strike against him, on the assumption that every JPE paper should get at least a few cites merely be appearing in the JPE.)
NB: An older, unpublished paper by Smart and Waldfogel uses the same technique.
Feynman on (Quantitative Empirical) Social Science
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Teppo for the pointer. Naturally I will accuse Feynmann of confusing science and scientism. As Rothbard put it:
In our proper condemnation of scientism in the study of man, we should not make the mistake of dismissing science as well. For if we do so, we credit scientism too highly and accept at face value its claim to be the one and only scientific method. . . . Science, after all, means scientia, correct knowledge; it is older and wiser than the positivist-pragmatist attempt to monopolize the term.
Best Few Sentences I Read Today, Macroeconomics Edition
| Peter Klein |
Olivier Blanchard, writing on “The State of Macro[economics]”:
The editors of this new Journal asked me to write about “The Future of Macroeconomics.” Nobody should accept such a task. One can forecast the near future with some confidence: Research technology is largely Austrian in nature, with output following inputs later in time. One can see the various teams at work, and thus be confident that, sooner or later, they will succeed. But it is nearly impossible to forecast beyond that.
The paper is generating quite a lot of blogospheric buzz. Mark Thoma has posted a chunk for readers lacking NBER access. In case you’re wondering, no, the Austrian theory of the business cycle is not part of Blanchard’s anticipated future.
BTW I have not been able to figure out which journal this paper was written for. Does anybody know?
Influence of E. A. G. Robinson on Coase
| Peter Klein |
The March 2008 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought features “On Robinson, Coase, and ‘The Nature of the Firm'” by Lowell Jacobsen. Robinson is E. A. G. Robinson, the Cambridge economist and longtime editor of the Economic Journal, now known mainly as the husband of Joan Robinson. Coase was trained by Arnold Plant and has written much about Plant’s influence. Jacobsen argues that Coase was also influenced significantly by Robinson, an influence that has not been widely appreciated. Here’s a bit from the conclusion:
Robinson’s influence on Coase’s writing of ‘‘The Nature of the Firm’’ through his The Structure of Competitive Industry is both obvious and significant. This is understandable, as Robinson and Coase both embraced and looked to extend the Marshallian tradition with these noted works.19 They sought to directly engage the real world of business as they were keenly interested in how firms actually behave, and why. They pursued answers to very fundamental questions: Why do firms exist? and, To what size? In addition, the study of firms and their industries requires a variety of considerations if effective decision-making by the firms’ managers is to be properly understood. In Cairncross’ fine biography of Robinson, he noted the brilliance of Robinson was his ability ‘‘to look at problems from different angles, against an historical background, taking in technology, organisational considerations, political feasibility’’ (Cairncross 1993, p. 164). Much the same could be said about Coase. . . .
[Robinson and Coase] were both interested in applying simple, yet compelling, economic concepts and theory such as scale economies, substitution at the margin and, of course, transaction costs. Further, it was important for them that economic analysis be grounded on realistic assumptions; theory that depended on fabricated assumptions to ensure tractability and even elegance should be largely avoided. Moreover, mathematics should not be the sine qua non of economic theory. Unfortunately, formalism and a priori theorizing emerged in the 1930s (given such influences as Robbins, Pigou, and even Joan Robinson) to dominate, if not define, mainstream economics, including the treatment of the firm. As a result, Coase and Robinson arguably became ‘‘outsiders’’ as Medema (1994), in his equally fine biography, concludes about Coase.
The paper is free, for now at least, on the Cambridge Journals site, so grab it while you can.
Barry Smith Online
| Peter Klein |
I just learned that Barry Smith’s influential book, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Open Court, 1994), is available online in its entirety. This is not a book on the Vienna School or logical positivism or Wittgenstein, but on the general philosophical climate in Austria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the influence of this climate on Carl Menger’s economics. Menger, Smith has argued, was steeped in the Catholic, Aristotelian tradition of classical Austrian philosophy and this helps explain how his “causal-realist” approach differs from its Walrasian and Jevonsian counterparts.
Best Three Sentences I Read Today
| Peter Klein |
Chris Dillow, wondering why doctors have such a good reputation, and economists such a poor one:
A man who’s been cured by a doctor lives to tell everyone. A man who’s been killed by one stays quiet. Economists’ “victims” — those stupid enough to believe forecasts — don’t keep schtum.
The rest of his reasons are interesting too. I think he focuses too much on economic forecasting, which is not in my view the same as economic analysis. The economy is not, after all, a “patient” to be taken care of and “cured” by the economist.
O&M at the AoM
| Peter Klein |
Ah, Los Angeles . . . land of “tattoos, breast implants, bleached hair, and vacuous egos,” as Nicolai recently wrote on Facebook. And then there are the people not in town for the Academy of Managment meeting!
As readers may know, the AoM is meeting this week in Anaheim. The O&M crowd is well represented, as usual. You can search the online program for your favorite person, subject, or interest area. Below are some of the sessions involving O&Mers, past and present: (more…)
New Center for Economic Documents Digitization
| Peter Klein |
Below is an announcement from the St. Louis Fed about its new digital document library, the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (CEDD). A nice complement to the CORI K-Base, Connie Helfat and Steve Klepper’s FIVE project, and similar resources. Three cheers for the Digital Age!
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis recently introduced the Center for Economic Documents Digitization (CEDD), with a mission to preserve the nation’s economic history through digitization. To date, CEDD has digitized more than 300,000 pages of published material and archival collections from the Federal Reserve System and selected partners — currently, the Brookings Institution, the Government Printing Office and the Missouri Historical Society.
This storehouse of documents includes U.S. government publications, Federal Reserve publications, photographs, manuscripts, and multimedia formats, all available on the St. Louis Fed’s FRASER (Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research) website: http://fraser.stlouisfed.org. (more…)
File Sharing Controversy: The Chronicle Weighs In
| Peter Klein |
The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a useful summary of the OS-Liebowitz debate on file sharing we’ve been following for a while (thanks to David Glenn for the tip). I like this description of the original piece by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf:
The paper seemed like a model piece of empirical social science for the Freakonomics era. Unusual data source analyzed with “instrumental variables”? Check. Counterintuitive conclusion? Check. Implications for hot-button policy debate? Check. The scholars filed an amicus brief in defense of file-sharing companies in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster case in 2005. When a revised version of their working paper appeared in the February 2007 issue of the Journal of Political Economy, it was the lead article.
And people think editorial decisions are made on purely scientific grounds. . . . Anyway, the article includes valuable background information and some interesting details. Strumpf suggests that Liebowitz is pressing the issue so zealously because Liebowitz’s center at UT-Dallas receives funding from the RIAA and “other commercial interests,” a charge I find shockingly inappropriate and unprofessional. (Anyone who knows Liebowitz can attest to his zeal on a number of unpopular issues, such as his defense of QWERTY and his attack on the Boston Fed study of mortgage discrimination.)
I don’t know the primary sources well but one gets the definite impression that Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf are being less-than-fully candid about their work. Their defenses against various critics (not only Liebowitz) seem weak and unconvincing. Overall, this episode reminds me of the Card-Kreuger controversy over the minimum wage: an empirical paper finds the opposite of what everyone expects and makes a big splash, but the authors don’t have a solid explanation for their findings, there are questions about the data and methods, and specialists aren’t convinced by the results. My conjecture is that in this case, like the minimum-wage episode, the spashy result will not stand the test of time.
More on the File Sharing Contretemps
| Peter Klein |
Stan Liebowitz has posted another comment on the JPE file sharing controversy. Stan ups the ante by including, as appendices, a synopsis of the controversy, copies of correspondence between himself and the authors of the original article, and copies of the JPE referee reports and editor Steve Levitt’s rejection letter. Readers outside of academia may enjoy this rare window into the arcane world of peer review. (Via Craig Newmark.)
Question: If the authors of the original paper, Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf, published their response to Stan, would we refer to it as OS/2?
Update: Stan reminds me to emphasize that the negative referee report from the JPE, the basis of Levitt’s rejection decision, was, in fact, written by Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf. In other words, there is an OS/2, and you can read it as one of Stan’s appendices. The core of Stan’s paper is a detailed reply to OS/2, arguing that they don’t have a legitimate response to the critiques in his original comment.
IRBs and Social-Science Research
| Peter Klein |
Most US research universities have an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, tasked with supervising “human-subjects” research. Unfortunately, the performance of the typical IRB is nothing short of disastrous, as we’ve noted before. IRB officials are trained to work with the physical and biomedical sciences, and have little knowledge of social-science research, though their mandate usually covers all research done at the university.
The July 2008 issue of Political Science & Politics, published by the American Political Science Association, contains a symposium on “Protecting Human Research Participants, IRBs, and Political Science Redux.” As editor Robert J-P. Hauck notes in his introduction:
By the 1990s, “IRBs had expanded their mission to include all research, not just research funded by the federal government, enhancing their scope of authority while slowing the timeliness of reviews. Similarly, and with the same result, IRBs were evaluating secondary research as well as primary research. Although the federal legislation provided for a nuanced assessment of risk, the distinction between potentially risk-laden research necessitating a full IRB review and research posing minimal or no risk that could be either exempted or given expedited review was disappearing. The length of the review process threatened the beginning or completion of course work and degree programs. IRBs were judging the merits of research projects rather than the risks involved. This trend was especially problematic because representation on many IRBs was skewed toward biological and behavioral scientists often unfamiliar with the methods and fields of political science and the other social sciences. And the list went on.
In the years that followed there have been several efforts to reform human subject regulation. . . . In the face of these and other efforts, are IRBs better able to effectively and efficiently protect human subjects in social science research?
Judging from the comments of the symposium authors, the answer is no. Now as in the past, IRBs have no consistently applied metric for measuring risk and corresponding levels of IRB review. Mitchell Seligson, Felice Levine and Paula Skedsvold, and Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea confirm that the review process has not and perhaps cannot accommodate survey methods and ethnographic and field research. The pace of the IRB review process continues to hinder undergraduate and graduate empirical research. IRBs’ rigid interpretations of requirements produce logically inconsistent directives such as when researchers are told to destroy data they diligently collected and anticipated sharing in order to protect research subjects’ anonymity (Seligson 2008; Yanow and Schwartz-Shea 2008; and Levine and Skedsvold 2008).
The pointer is from Zachary Schrag, who promises to comment on each article in the symposium.
Whither Chicago Economics?
| Peter Klein |
Steve Levitt, writing on the controversy surrounding the University of Chicago’s proposed Milton Friedman Institute, says this:
The Chicago economics department views the world differently than anyone else, even other economics departments. Having learned my economics at Harvard and M.I.T., I took my first teaching job at Chicago with the very explicit idea that I would spend two or three years in Chicago to get to “know the enemy.” After I figured out how they thought, I would escape back to more comfortable surroundings.
Well two things happened that I didn’t expect. First, it turned out that it wasn’t so easy to learn to think like a Chicago economist. I’ve been trying to learn for more than a decade and I still have learned only the rudiments. Every day my colleagues teach me something I should know, but don’t. Second, I decided that the Chicago approach to economics was the right one for me, even though I am not that good at it.
I wish Levitt would elaborate on the differences between contemporary Chicago economics and the economics of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Stanford, because I don’t see any. The Chicago economics of 1970 or even 1980 was distinct from that of its East and West coast rivals. The Journal of Political Economy, and even more so the Journal of Law and Economics, had a unique style and approach. Chicago-influenced economics departments at UCLA, Washington, Texas A&M, Clemson, and elsewhere were disseminating (and deepening) the brand. But that’s all gone. It’s hard to see any unique vision today. Indeed, the diversity among US economics departments seems a thing of the past, as I noted before. They are all mini-MITs. How, exactly, is Chicago economics any different?
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