Sorry about the light blogging the last couple of weeks, but I’ve been pretty busy and will be into April, so don’t expect much of a change. That being said, I offer you this excellent profile of a number of George Mason University’s economists. I follow a number of their blogs (Marginal Revolution, Cafe Hayek, etc.), and these are some of my favorite thinkers around in pretty much any field these days. However, I also have a number of friends getting their PhDs in econ from George Mason, so it’s kinda sorta like I know these people, which may make it more interesting for me than for you. To hopefully alleviate that problem, read this excerpt–an exchange between the author and Robin Hanson–and see if it doesn’t interest you sufficiently to read the whole thing:
A tendency in Hansonian rhetoric, I found, was to describe the world in such a tone as to channel the harshness of the very aspect of the world he wanted to palliate. For example, he wrote a paper on the economics of The Matrix. In assigning the computer-controlled matrix a real-world analogue, he decided on genes. “Your genes are making you do stuff that is in their interest and not yours, like, for example DIE,” he explained to me, pumping equal measures of joy and revulsion into that last syllable.
Hanson was also more than willing to train his sights on his own profession. “On a kind of local level,” he began quietly, “academics are trying to succeed in being impressive. They’re trying to get impressive articles published in impressive journals, departments are trying to hire impressive people, and journals are trying to publish impressive articles so that they’ll seem to be higher status, and they’re all bidding for some level of ‘impressive,’ which ultimately means not everyone can do this, and that can often lead to innovation — that is, one way to be impressive is to do certain kinds of things that are innovative — but it doesn’t have to be.”
“Why should academics investigate interesting, promising topics per se if they’re not rewarded for it?” he continued, with a touch of ironical bitterness, “Just like everybody else, they’ve got some customers, the customers want something, and they’re rewarded for giving the customers what they want.”
“Would you have chosen to go to a school with less prestigious people who nevertheless contributed more to innovation? Would you have? ” His voice is still calm yet somehow incendiary.
I replied that I knew I wanted to go to a prestigious school, and chose the one I currently attend because I had visited it on a particularly pleasant day.
“So apparently prestige and a tolerable climate, and setting, of course, were the main criteria, right? You didn’t look for innovation, you didn’t say, ‘How much have these people contributed?’ You know, you could have read a magazine and said, ‘Wow. Here’s a person that’s really contributed a lot. I think I’ll go to his school.’ You didn’t do that, right? So you’re a customer, you did what all the other customers do, so you can’t complain that you get the product you wanted. You got prestige. You didn’t ask for innovation. You didn’t get innovation necessarily. You got prestige.”
I agreed, but qualified this mildly by saying that I don’t think my high-school self would have picked an innovative professor very well.
“But if there’s something you weren’t looking for then even if you have better judgment you weren’t necessarily going to pick it.” He had got me there, and another bias had been overcome.
