Categories:
Behavioral Economics
Unintended Consequences
Economics has an efficiency problem.
The length of papers published in top tier journals has tripled in the past 40 years, expanding to such a degree that readers often struggle to finish them.
Hmmm. An efficiency problem. Article lengths have tripled. Readers often struggle to finish them.
Is there any way to solve this problem? I know it’s hard but a whole bunch of Ph.D. economists should be able to solve it.
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
Now check out the American Economic Association’s solution.
HT2 Tyler Cowen.
READER COMMENTS
robc
Jun 7 2019 at 12:48pm
While we are at it, can we get SCOTUS to return to the one page decisions they used to write?
Phil
Jun 7 2019 at 1:56pm
What decision of any importance did SCOTUS render in only one page?
Jon Murphy
Jun 7 2019 at 4:20pm
And, with respect, I’m not sure quality has improved much, if at all, as articles have gotten longer. I mean, read classic Demsetz, Alchian, or Coase. In Towards a Theory of Property Rights, Demsetz has more insight in just 10 pages than in many econ articles of 40+. James Buchanan has more insights in footnotes than many articles have in their whole bodies.
I wonder how much of it revolves around the referring process. I’m new to the game, so take my observations for what they are worth, but the reports I’ve and other friends/colleagues have gotten back often require lots of revisions, some of which are irrelevant or only tangential to the overall paper. Anticipating and correcting these objections add many pages on.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2019 at 7:33pm
Good example with Demsetz. Coase’s example is not a good one. His “The Problem of Social Cost” was 44 pages. Of course, you can point to other brief Coase articles such as his one on Durability and Monopoly in the Journal of Law and Economics.
But yes, on your point about referees, you’re exactly right. This applies especially to empirical papers, which are a higher percent of journal articles than, say, 3 decades ago. Referees want you to correct for this or that nine ways from Sunday. And authors, anticipating this and fearing the hated rejection, try to correct nine ways from Sunday.
john hare
Jun 7 2019 at 5:51pm
I’m not an economist at all, much less a PH.D. My thought was competition, and the linked article seems to agree.
David Henderson
Jun 7 2019 at 7:36pm
You’re right, John. It’s just that when one of the main sets of journals that has this problem is run by the American Economic Association, it’s ironic that, instead of starting to impose page limits on their articles, that very association introduces a new journal with short articles.
It would be as if Ford, noticing that people wanted smaller cars, kept producing the Lincoln Continental and the Edsel but introduced the Fiesta. You would expect a for-profit enterprise, responding to customer demand, to downsize a little or even get rid of one or two of its larger models. The analogy isn’t perfect, but I think it makes the point.
Matthias Goergens
Jun 7 2019 at 10:07pm
Haven’t blogs and arxiv mostly taken over for dissemination of knowledge? Articles in journals are mostly for keeping score in the publish-or-perish game, aren’t they?
Mark Z
Jun 10 2019 at 10:54am
To my knowledge, though arxiv has become a popular medium in some fields (especially the mathy ones) in most disciplines the journals are still dominant.
David Seltzer
Jun 11 2019 at 10:45am
It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.
David Seltzer
Jun 11 2019 at 10:49am
With apologies, the previous post is credited to William of Ockham.
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