Exactly one year ago, on 21 April  2012, I started this blog. Honestly, as an experiment. I just wanted to find out for myself whether I would enjoy this activity as much as I thought.

The result: I enjoyed it a lot, maybe too much in some sense, and then again, the initial fun (and even thrill) is certainly gone. I do thank everyone who read and occasionally enjoyed this blog.

So, I am going to start a new experiment. I want to see whether I can do without this blog, I want to see whether I can simply shut up if something gets under my skin – while the blog sometimes also contained some funny or simply meaningless postings, it was mostly complaining. That was fun, for a while.

Maybe the result will be: I am addicted, addicted to this blog, to complaining, to letting the world know about my complaining. Then I won’t be able to help it and will be back. Maybe the result will be that I do enjoy the occasional blogging, then I might be back, too, perhaps less frequent and more selectively. Or this may just be it. Who knows… Ciao!

Hier.

What a bunch of baloney!

Frank Lübberding ist wohl Schuld. Schade, ich habe ihn (weniger seine Muppetshow im Hintergrund) immer gerne gelesen.

Auch die ZEIT berichtet.

Hier.

Hier.

I want to touch on this post by the Wirtschaftsphilosoph who is a tenured German professor, who blogs under a pseudonym and who is now afraid of being exposed (full disclosure: I know the identity of the Wirtschaftsphilosoph, but of course I am not going to divulge it). He (I am using a generic masculine) is now thinking of stopping his  blog for fear of being exposed.

The other potentially important piece of information is that he has been very vocal against the Euro and has started advocating (I believe as a new member) the new Anti-Euro party in Germany, AfD.

I can only speculate about the true reasons why he fears being exposed with his true identity so much (and maybe it is not fear at all, just a matter of fun or principle or whatever). But I did want to make a few points as to why I can see why he might be ”afraid”, which the commentators to the aforementioned post do not seem to really understand (he is after all a German civil cervant, cannot be fired, so what is there to be afraid of?).

Well, a lot. Suppose this colleague ever wanted to move. In Germany, just like in the US, the way to really increase your life time income in academia is to generate outside offers. Now suppose the strong, public anti-Euro stance of this colleague becomes known. How many university presidents, who all have to deal with local municipial authorities, will be thrilled to hire this guy, given the Euro consensus sauce that we have in Germany? Very concretely, in Aachen the president of the RWTH is part of the Karls Prize Committee, a prize that recognizes “European achievements” – is it really crazy to think that this guy might think that Aachen would not make him an offer (independently of his scientific achievements). And just like Aachen, a lot of cities in Germany have similar prizes, and the president of the local university is usually part of this local club. So, not being able to move is, depending on your age, a potentially huge permanent income cut, we are talking thousands, ten thousands of Euro in life time consumption. And even if you don’t want to move and are happy where you are, your are still dependent in your every day work on many things from the university administration that are not contracted and cannot be taken to court, if push comes to shove. So, true, university professors enjoy a great (de jure) independence, it is a phantastic job (the best job in the world), but they also have a lot to lose and they can be hurt big time in doing what they love doing. And then it comes down to: is it really worth speaking up? Why should I do this to myself?

So, again, I have no way of knowing whether this what is behind the Wirtschaftsphilosoph’s hesitance, but it may be. I also want to point out that this is not meant as a defence or promotion of the AfD on my part, which I like on the one hand, because it formulates one coherent scenario how to deal with the crisis as a policy platform and thus completes the choice space: on the other hand, I don’t like it, because there are other coherent ways to deal with the crisis which do not involve abolishing the Euro, and because I don’t like professors using their academic credentials to promote policy (rather than just discussing consequences of policies) – the German general public unfortunately is not very well versed in the fine positive-normative distinction, so subtle abuse of professorial soft power is an issue here (not even speaking of the fact that professors are paid to do research, not politics). But that is a side issue…

I have of course chosen a different route and made my identity known. Sometimes I think this was juvenile naivete and that I hurt myself with this blog or, more generally, with being opinionated and voicing this opinion publicly (even during the hiring process in Aachen, which otherwise has been absolutely professional and an overall pleasant experience, at some point I had to dispell rumors that I was a methodological and political ideologue). I know for a fact that it has hurt my chances of being made offers on multiple occasions (maybe some day more on this). And sometimes I do ask myself, just like the Wirtschaftsphilosoph: Why do I do this? Why not stop and shut up? And maybe I will… It would make life easier in some dimensions.

PS: this morning I read this article that the UN (yes, the same organization that gives dictators the same vote as Germany) has criticized Germany and put forth an ultimatum for not dealing with Thilo Sarrazin – again, I think his theses are basically crap, but I would still defend his right to say them. How anyone can think that there are no costs of speaking freely in this day and age (just like this ZEIT author, who thinks that all is well with freedom of speech in Germany and ridicules everybody who thinks otherwise), is beyond me.

Update: to make this absolutely clear. The example with the RWTH Aachen president was meant as a complete hypothetical. I have no way of knowing how he would actually handle such a case (I assume he would handle it utterly professionally, as I have experienced him so far), the point was merely that people might feel a general climate, justified or unjustified, where they are afraid to speak up. Aachen and the Karl’s Prize just made a good concrete, again HYPOTHETICAL example to make a more general point.

Update 2: I feel this post is too long for what it wants to say. Let me try it differently and more succinctly: to judge risks for tenured professors or civil servants resulting from them speaking up you have to gauge the risk for their expected life time income, not for their current income, which is mostly nil, the risk that is…

Jan Fleischhauer (himself a journalist) has a funny explanation: they were not good enough to do a real thing, to produce something real (says he, not me), deep down they know that, but of course have a need to justify before themselves what they are doing, so they blame the society, the capitalists, the economists, etc., and try to keep the moral highground.

Hm….

Super, klasse. Wo kann ich unterschreiben? Aber bitte gute, keine Pfosten!

For coverage in the German media, see the FAZ with a lot of further links, the ZEIT and SPON. Basically, the Econ blogosphere and the Twitterverse plus EJMR went nuts over this, unsurprisingly of course. It’s just too good a story, people, grad students, from a marginalized department at UMass take on the rulers of the world at Harvard; the anti-austerity guys now go full steam: we told you so (SPON and the ZEIT have exactly this slant; and Kruggels, too, of course). Although, let’s make one thing clear: at least I have seen no indication even in the revised results that high debt is actually conducive to growth, so let’s just all calm down.

On a personal, purely selfish level, I am of course somewhat happy that this time another RR is in the cross hairs, but whateva!

First of all, I think mistakes, especially coding mistakes happen and nobody needs to be ashamed of them. Admit them (which RR now have), correct them and let’s all move on. Nothing to see here.

Secondly, RR ought to be commended for their enormous data work. Collecting these historic time series for various countries is not trivial! Having these data is a great plus for the profession. Full stop.

That said, there are two questions that have to be raised: how, if at all, culpable are RR that there results somehow got a causal interpretation in the general public and with policy makers (Noahopinion links to this oped by RR which at least suggests that outside academia RR indeed gave their results a causal interpretation). This is problematic, as as far as I can see there is nothing in their research design that could have credibly established causality between high debt and low growth. Again, there is no shame in that, sometimes you can’t do better and knowing correlations is still helpful as Pete Klenow has rightly pointed out. But then you cannot go around publicly and make strong policy recommendations (or allow others to make them).

The second question is the significance of the 90 percent threshold, which used to suggest some kind of a strong nonlinearity or something (this result seems essentially gone, not the declining relationship as such), and again how culpable RR are in letting this number take on a life of its own. I would have always been sceptical about this number – what is magic about it? How can we make any sense of such a number without a reasonably rich quantitative and seriously calibrated model (as economists we should be wary of apparent natural constants).

The bottom line: the arguments against fiscal stimulus are richer than the RR evidence, and the case for stimulus was never killed by RR’s work.

Here is actually a surprisingly (given the source, EJMR) good take on the whole thing (I might have replaced “robust” at the end with “significantly different from zero” or just “sexy”, but other than that, I wish I had written this – of course, it is true that RR maybe should just have shown more and different data treatments, which might have made the results muddier, but at least we would have learned something – the author of the post is exactly right that muddiness of results should not be punished, but hailed as honest research):

I think if there’s a broader lesson to be learned from the R&R saga, it is that journals too often reward “”strong” or “unexpected” or “highly significant” empirical results. As anyone who has done empirical work knows, there are plenty of different ways to look at the data, each with their own merits. And anyone can minke a coding mistake.

Papers should be published because of (1) importance/difficulty of the question, (2) the novelty and sophistication of the approach(es) used to answer the question, and a distant (3) should be the actual result/answer to the question.

Journal’s focus on (3) really distorts incentives. Ex-ante, one doesn’t know the answer to a question. One can control the type of questions asked and the tools/data used to answer said questions. From an efficiency perspective it seems that we’d like to incentivize things researchers can actually influence. Sexiness of results ain’t one of them.

For example, should a revise and resubmit ever be conditional on the “results being robust”? I’d day no. Either it’s an interesting question asked using appropriate tools or it’s not. Whether the results are robust shouldn’t affect the decision to publish (within reason, of course). After all, we do learn something from “null results” and such results should be published.

As it is, researchers are under pressure to sell results as sexy. This is one of the worst consequences of the “freakonomics” revolution. It’s bad science. Researchers are incentivized not to report the answer to a question as they best understand it, but rather to push the angle that is sexiest. This leads to data mining, sloppy empirical work, selective presentation of results, and even outright book-cooking.

This is not to excuse R&R per se, and of course you need to incentivize researchers to do a thorough job and get the “right” answers. It’s just more generally there is far too much focus on results and not enough in research design, importance of questions, and the process of good research more generally. An entire army of PhD students are graduating who think getting a “gotcha!” result is the way to fame and tenure. That’s not science.

What a brilliant idea! Have a constitutional committment by the government (maybe like Artikel 1 in the German constitution with an eternity guarantee) that, no matter what happens, the government can never take away more than x per cent of your life time income or, better yet, consumption. How about making x=50? The exact number is up for debate, of course. In any event, this could spur economic activity enormously. Alas, the lawyers refused a similar idea (Halbteilungsgrundsatz) already in Germany. And the politicians are never gonna give up the power to take it from you.

Ich hoffe wirklich sehr, dass wir uns an staatlichen Unis niemals solcher idiotischen und absolut psychomäßigen Aufnahmetest bedienen, wie dieser SPON Artikel auch noch vorschlägt. Ziemlich lächerlich, wie man sich da als Elite verkauft.

Mir wäre es schon ganz lieb, Studenten könnten höhere Mathe, Statistik, Daten und Graphiken interpretieren, sinnvoll und prägnant schreiben, analytisch denken und fließend Englisch sprechen und schreiben.

Political science professor emeritus Andrew Hacker says yes in the NYT.

1) A French-Spanish team of researchers on significance bias in Economics publishing. The Economic Logician is also commenting.

2) From the annual conference of the European Geosciences Union (in German). Russians claiming they can forecast earthquakes, but that they are being shunned by European and American citation cartels, while they are building their own little hermetic groups. Sounds familiar, anyone, to any economist?

3) My favorite EJMR post of the past few weeks:

 

Things most economists believe: rent seeking no good (except tenure, since that benefits economists). People respond to financial incentives (except for economics journal reviewers, who shouldn’t be paid to provide fast reviews). Open markets are good (except for economics journals, which should be centralized and associated with particular universities to optimize corruption).

The main thing that economists believe is that the findings of economists should have no bearing on the structure of the economics profession.

Maximilian Maybury (MIT Student) im ZEIT Interview. Könnte jetzt nicht sagen, dass mein Riechorgan bei den Aachener Ingenieuren schon einmal belästigt worden wäre…

Was manche Journalisten so über Ökonomik berichten…

Nein, Ricardianische Handelstheorien sind nicht der neueste Schrei in der Wissenschaft, wir wissen schon sehr lange das der Ricardianische Handelsgrund, nämlich Spezialisierungsgewinne, wahrscheinlich nur einen speziellen Teil der internationalen Handelsströme erklärt.

Und die Tatsache, dass Produktvielfalt gut für die Absicherung gegenüber sektoralen Schocks und Trends ist, ist interessant, nicht ganz neu, aber widerspricht natürlich in keiner Weise der Sicht, dass Freihandel in den meisten Fällen wohlfahrtserhöhend ist.

According to The Atlantic.

Patrick Bernau auf FAZIT zum Haucap-Mödl Papier.

Laut SPON. Glückwunsch.