December 13, 2004

THIS RINGS TRUE to me -- Arnold Kling on The Academic Ego Game. Quotable:
If you find two people of approximately equal intellectual talent, one inside academia and one outside of it, it does not necessarily follow that the non-academic is one who sold out for a higher salary. The academic might have had better luck or more patience for playing the ego game. The non-academic may not have wanted to take part in the fads that were sweeping a field at a particular time. The non-academic might have a greater desire to see research applied than to see it published. And of course anyone who prefers teaching to research is severely penalized in the ego game of academia. So the "washouts" who go into business after being denied tenure may include some of the better teachers. At a personal level, I believe that all of these factors affected me. When I was in graduate school, the great fad sweeping economics was "rational expectations," which I considered to be a decent enough philosophical idea that was turned into an excuse for pointless mathematical masturbation. Whether I was right or wrong, it was a career-limiting opinion, because departments only wanted to hire people who were "doing rational expectations."
Of course, the most important of all the "rigorous" tests of professional "competence" among the economists is the completely specious "significance" test, which is deployed in a full 80% of all economic journal articles.

If truth be told, "rigor" and formalism across a million different degenerate research programs in the humanities and social sciences are the greatest waste of intellectual talent in the history of mankind. Much of academic philosophy is nothing other than the "brilliant" pursuit of logic chopping within various "formalism" made possible by conceptual mistakes. But it is all very "rigorous" and it all provides formal "tests" for deciding who deserves publication and professional advancement and who does not. Ludwig Wittgenstein provides the landmark critique of this great font of philosophical thumb spinning. Wittgenstein, of course, is little taught and even less well understood by most "professionals" -- who belittle him as "non-rigorous" and "obscure". These issues are large, and related in surprising ways to the reasons why academics fail to grasp and/or respect the most important contributions of Friedrich Hayek. But those are matters for another day. Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack