> If you find evidence that an educational intervention works or that a market is doing bad things, the paper is much more likely to be accepted than if you find nothing of the sort.
I would say this is more about publication bias that favors finding an effect over a null result than social desirability bias. Economic journals will publish findings that show markets work well or support educational signaling, but it's often harder to obtain such an effect with a simple statistical test.
I think this is becoming more strongly the case over time. As the profession becomes more empirical, economists lean a lot less on foundational theory (which tends to support markets and places a lot of weight on information asymmetry) to frame their investigations and instead combine very rich data with simple statistics. Even so, there is still a lot of pro-market work that gets published, some of it really ingenious (see the below link on Investment CAPM, which bears a lot of similarity to Austrian economics). But it's harder to break through and capture spotlight attention in the field when Chetty-style big data approaches and behavioral econ are so much more readily contextualized and understood.
None of this is to say that the field hasn't experienced some political capture. Undoubtedly, such is the case when it comes to highly salient progressive topics like income inequality, as this recent piece by (highly published and cited) Josh Rauh attests.
"Both research and public opinion have proceeded apace, largely as if the refutations of Piketty-Saez-Zucman don’t exist."
Trans just seems like a logical extension of gay rights. Steve Sailer called this years before gay marriage even became law.
Yes, we could drone on for hours about the differences, but bottom line "weird fringe sexual group deserves higher status and civil rights" is the basic template. When trying to find Steve's old articles Cowen's 2015 gay marriage post came up and it says:
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Second, it encourages the idea that there are significant freedoms still to be won.
Which freedom will be next?
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Steve Sailer commented:
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"Which freedom will be next?"
The future arrived a couple of years ago when the New York Times, with World War G a done deal, launched World War T with a long article about how society discriminates against MMA fighter Fallon Fox for not letting her beat up women for money just because she was born male:
With the Kardashian Klan jumping all over this money making trend, WWT isn't the future, it's practically jumped the shark already. But transgenderism promises years of amusement.
The social desirability crisis in scientific publication is passed onto regulations. When I looked at the details of how the anti-gas stove activists and contracts from government regulators created their data on the health risk they were doing a massive deception. The researchers get the results the funding agencies wanted.
> If you find evidence that an educational intervention works or that a market is doing bad things, the paper is much more likely to be accepted than if you find nothing of the sort.
I would say this is more about publication bias that favors finding an effect over a null result than social desirability bias. Economic journals will publish findings that show markets work well or support educational signaling, but it's often harder to obtain such an effect with a simple statistical test.
I think this is becoming more strongly the case over time. As the profession becomes more empirical, economists lean a lot less on foundational theory (which tends to support markets and places a lot of weight on information asymmetry) to frame their investigations and instead combine very rich data with simple statistics. Even so, there is still a lot of pro-market work that gets published, some of it really ingenious (see the below link on Investment CAPM, which bears a lot of similarity to Austrian economics). But it's harder to break through and capture spotlight attention in the field when Chetty-style big data approaches and behavioral econ are so much more readily contextualized and understood.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/12/q-factors-and-investment-capm.html
None of this is to say that the field hasn't experienced some political capture. Undoubtedly, such is the case when it comes to highly salient progressive topics like income inequality, as this recent piece by (highly published and cited) Josh Rauh attests.
"Both research and public opinion have proceeded apace, largely as if the refutations of Piketty-Saez-Zucman don’t exist."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-economists-whod-rather-be-influencers-social-science-data-errors-mobility-3be7d70d
Trans just seems like a logical extension of gay rights. Steve Sailer called this years before gay marriage even became law.
Yes, we could drone on for hours about the differences, but bottom line "weird fringe sexual group deserves higher status and civil rights" is the basic template. When trying to find Steve's old articles Cowen's 2015 gay marriage post came up and it says:
===
Second, it encourages the idea that there are significant freedoms still to be won.
Which freedom will be next?
===
Steve Sailer commented:
===
"Which freedom will be next?"
The future arrived a couple of years ago when the New York Times, with World War G a done deal, launched World War T with a long article about how society discriminates against MMA fighter Fallon Fox for not letting her beat up women for money just because she was born male:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/post-gay-marriage-cont.html
With the Kardashian Klan jumping all over this money making trend, WWT isn't the future, it's practically jumped the shark already. But transgenderism promises years of amusement.
===
The social desirability crisis in scientific publication is passed onto regulations. When I looked at the details of how the anti-gas stove activists and contracts from government regulators created their data on the health risk they were doing a massive deception. The researchers get the results the funding agencies wanted.