If it makes the academics feel any better, you can look back at 20 years of hard work on commercial projects and come to the same conclusion. It's hard to identify companies and projects that will still seem genuinely important 5 years later and be in the position to make important contributions to them. Most new companies poop out. Many projects at big successful companies involve spending 2 years to re-style the login page. The bulk of companies getting by in the middle often seem replaceable and mediocre from a distance.
I think that's why Elon has been so successful at recruiting.
This is an unbelievably scathing critique of academic economics considering what a successful career Levitt had (and that he is presumably holding back somewhat so as to not burn too many bridges).
"It was being passed around Washington because it was the only paper that supported the position that they had already chosen."
Moral of the story: If you want politicians to listen, tell them what they want to hear. Would MMT have been given so much attention in any other environment? Could it have even been conceived in any other environment?
That is quite a thing to read. Other than the bit about reaching the pinnacle and being in academia for a really long time, it probably matches almost every experience of PhD students who want to work on hard problems and teach then see what it is really like and nope out. Quietly damning of the institution of universities we have had.
No influence? Even callers to sports radio these days talk about "outliers," "variance" and "small sample size." Freakonomics had a lot to do with that.
But isn't that a result of his popularity writing, not his technical research? You don't *need* a PhD to write a Freakonomics-style book. Malcolm Gladwell wrote books in a similar genre to Freakonomics (though less technical/statistically-informed), and he was (and is) immensely popular.
While his popular writing pulls from other researchers too, almost all of his (and Dubner) popular writing is based on the same work as the journal papers.
Gladwell is a great writer but I'd argue his topics aren't all that similar. Thaler and Kahnemann come much closer.
Neat summary of field of economics. It is difficult to be a scientific field when the ground underneath is not only complex but constantly shifting. The mathematization at least forces some rigor, but it does get lost in theoretical tangents. It is also way too abstract, does not pay enough attention to the institutional microstructure. So here we are after a couple of centuries of modelling and what has been learned, what can be used to inform policy?
The link goes to an email exchange between Steve Levitt and Steve Sailer concerning Levitt's abortion-and-crime paper.
I know Steve Sailer has alluded to writing up a critique of the paper in his column. I only skimmed this pdf though, so I'm not sure if this email exchange is what he was alluding to or if there is a more substantive, full-length article out there somewhere.
My optimism about the field of economics remains despite Levitt's, Arnold's, and my own experiences. As one commenter said earlier, I "noped out" of academia. Nonetheless, I believe that the economist's way of thinking still has a lot to say that is quite useful. I recall listening to a presentation by an academic who, at the time roughly 30 years ago, was the Chief Economist at the SEC. (If I recall correctly, he was on leave from Rochester.) He said his job boiled down to telling all the lawyers (regulators) to stop writing some new regulation because it flew in the face of economic reality.
Economics can teach us to think about problems rigorously (i.e. methodically and logically) with or without "mathiness" and stop the world from doing stupid stuff. We still have many battles to fight - minimum wages, tax simplification, and rationalizing the U.S. health care industry come to mind. These problems would all be simpler to solve if more people - especially politicians - understood basic principles of economics, even at the Econ 101 level.
Late one night, an obvious student is leaving the Central Square Stop and Shop and puts 12 items on the express belt, right under the sign saying "10 items or fewer". The cashier looks at him and asks "are you from MIT and can't read or Harvard and can't count?"
(For context, Stop and Shop is or was a New England grocery chain and Central Square is about half-way between MIT and Harvard).
(Disclaimer: I graduated from MIT. They ain't kidding about the math. I'm surprised my history classes didn't include any.)
Well. I have no concrete evidence one way or the other so, yes, absolutely, I'm related to Oliver Smoot, the bridge length ruler. I also firmly believe I'm related to Nobel-laureate Dr. George Smoot and have nothing to do with that loser, Senator Reed Smoot.
Not that I let my personal preferences influence my conclusions. No, who'd do that?
FWIW, Oliver's son attended MIT a few years after I did. I can only imagine how much he got pestered about it.
“Most academic research has no lasting presence.” Cut funding, cut funding, cut funding. Move to Substack. Let’s move toward a system in which customers are directly paying teachers and researchers. If you can’t satisfy your customers find another profession.
I don't understand why Levitt would see a future of irrelevance for economics. It seems to me he's right in the middle of a worthwhile future along with Thaler, Kahnemann, Mulligan, and others who look at very practical questions.
“And I really feel like our field has moved towards technicality. Harder proofs.” Likewise with other academic fields. How many interpretations of Shakespeare do we need? I say we need to cut funding. There is too much research that no one cares about or reads. Let’s get back to the fundamentals and start working on real problems.
I don't see any reason to cut finding in total. As you hint, the question is a matter of what should be funded.
Note: Funding the right things can be a very difficult proposition. I was at a rather broadly focused govt research lab. One of my coworkers was a physicist who did EMP security. Funding was winding down when I started work there and it came back once ~20 years later. It is impossible to maintain in-house expertise under those conditions. Lots of other research suffered similar fates.
How about gradual, prudent cuts annually across the board? 5% per year? In parallel ensure that legislation is not hindering private markets from filling in where needed. Defense spending too?
“I was a data scientist who was messing around with data…” Playing with and presenting data is fun. We all go through this phase and it probably never stops being fun.
That is a rather more telling sentence than one might think. There is a bit of a… slur maybe?… that most economists are just failed math majors. That most have no idea of how economies work, or even how people and businesses work, but just push numbers around like it is telling and call it economics. Here’s someone at the top of the profession in many respects openly saying that is exactly what he was. That is quite significant to me.
Let me read it again in full. “I just absolutely got converted to the power of Chicago thinking. It really, as I heard people like Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy and everyone talking, it just made sense to me. It was a different version of the world. There's a more serious economic application. I wasn't an economist at MIT. I was a data scientist who was messing around with data….once I got to Chicago, I began writing completely different kinds of papers. And it was very influential and I never left.” I’m not clear how old he is at MIT. Let’s see…He received his PhD in ‘94 and started at Chicago in ‘97, so he was still green at MIT. He might just be referring to himself. He’s trying to point to a better economics at Chicago, and it’s not clear if he’s throwing all MIT economists under the bus. Good question though. Maybe he will clarify in the future.
Not just MIT, almost all economists follow the MIT model of “do more math”. You can’t get papers published without a fairly complicated mathematical model these days, and for the past twenty years or so. Finding an economics paper published in a mainstream journal without a mathematical treatment is like finding a unicorn (or possibly an ideological paen) no matter how unnecessary it is to communicate the idea.
No, if anything he isn't going far enough. Professional economics has been in a poor state for a while, rapidly approaching rock bottom of late. The universities in general have been going downhill, of course, but in a different way economics went from a discipline of its own to being essentially applied mathematics. Even beyond questions of "Where would Adam Smith publish today?" it isn't clear that Hayek or J.S. Mill would be able to get published. There was a notable survey of economists a couple of years back regarding what they thought were the most important papers for advancing economics; none of their answers were post 1990 as I recall. Now that might be because all the important work was pretty much done by then and past that it was just application of principles, but I rather doubt that was the case. As others (Kling I am pretty sure was one) have pointed out, nothing done to deal with the 2008 crash could be found in any theory or textbook case of how the Fed should react. Modern Monetary Theory is strangely popular but basically madness from an economic theory perspective. It seems to me that people calling themselves economists have largely abandoned economic theory in favor of doing math that suggests their preferred course of action is the right one.
But then I am a pessimist and like to see things work, and don't have much respect for people who claim to know how things work but remain unable to make it so.
If you listen to him talk enough I think it would be hard to be surprised he said something like this. It's his nature. Like all of us, he has some quirks. This fits right in.
If it makes the academics feel any better, you can look back at 20 years of hard work on commercial projects and come to the same conclusion. It's hard to identify companies and projects that will still seem genuinely important 5 years later and be in the position to make important contributions to them. Most new companies poop out. Many projects at big successful companies involve spending 2 years to re-style the login page. The bulk of companies getting by in the middle often seem replaceable and mediocre from a distance.
I think that's why Elon has been so successful at recruiting.
This is an unbelievably scathing critique of academic economics considering what a successful career Levitt had (and that he is presumably holding back somewhat so as to not burn too many bridges).
I get the impression that economics is one of the healthier disciplines in the social sciences, too.
"It was being passed around Washington because it was the only paper that supported the position that they had already chosen."
Moral of the story: If you want politicians to listen, tell them what they want to hear. Would MMT have been given so much attention in any other environment? Could it have even been conceived in any other environment?
That is quite a thing to read. Other than the bit about reaching the pinnacle and being in academia for a really long time, it probably matches almost every experience of PhD students who want to work on hard problems and teach then see what it is really like and nope out. Quietly damning of the institution of universities we have had.
It's even worse if you consider the additional issues in Canceling of the American Mind. I'm about halfway through it.
No influence? Even callers to sports radio these days talk about "outliers," "variance" and "small sample size." Freakonomics had a lot to do with that.
But isn't that a result of his popularity writing, not his technical research? You don't *need* a PhD to write a Freakonomics-style book. Malcolm Gladwell wrote books in a similar genre to Freakonomics (though less technical/statistically-informed), and he was (and is) immensely popular.
While his popular writing pulls from other researchers too, almost all of his (and Dubner) popular writing is based on the same work as the journal papers.
Gladwell is a great writer but I'd argue his topics aren't all that similar. Thaler and Kahnemann come much closer.
What kind of influence did Levitt expect with research like "why drug dealers live with their moms"?
Neat summary of field of economics. It is difficult to be a scientific field when the ground underneath is not only complex but constantly shifting. The mathematization at least forces some rigor, but it does get lost in theoretical tangents. It is also way too abstract, does not pay enough attention to the institutional microstructure. So here we are after a couple of centuries of modelling and what has been learned, what can be used to inform policy?
What do you make of the substantive criticism of his abortion crime paper?
Link?
Maybe this?
https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DoesAbortionPreventCrime.pdf
The link goes to an email exchange between Steve Levitt and Steve Sailer concerning Levitt's abortion-and-crime paper.
I know Steve Sailer has alluded to writing up a critique of the paper in his column. I only skimmed this pdf though, so I'm not sure if this email exchange is what he was alluding to or if there is a more substantive, full-length article out there somewhere.
My optimism about the field of economics remains despite Levitt's, Arnold's, and my own experiences. As one commenter said earlier, I "noped out" of academia. Nonetheless, I believe that the economist's way of thinking still has a lot to say that is quite useful. I recall listening to a presentation by an academic who, at the time roughly 30 years ago, was the Chief Economist at the SEC. (If I recall correctly, he was on leave from Rochester.) He said his job boiled down to telling all the lawyers (regulators) to stop writing some new regulation because it flew in the face of economic reality.
Economics can teach us to think about problems rigorously (i.e. methodically and logically) with or without "mathiness" and stop the world from doing stupid stuff. We still have many battles to fight - minimum wages, tax simplification, and rationalizing the U.S. health care industry come to mind. These problems would all be simpler to solve if more people - especially politicians - understood basic principles of economics, even at the Econ 101 level.
Obligatory MIT/Hahvahd joke:
Late one night, an obvious student is leaving the Central Square Stop and Shop and puts 12 items on the express belt, right under the sign saying "10 items or fewer". The cashier looks at him and asks "are you from MIT and can't read or Harvard and can't count?"
(For context, Stop and Shop is or was a New England grocery chain and Central Square is about half-way between MIT and Harvard).
(Disclaimer: I graduated from MIT. They ain't kidding about the math. I'm surprised my history classes didn't include any.)
are you any relation to the units used to measure the bridge?
Well. I have no concrete evidence one way or the other so, yes, absolutely, I'm related to Oliver Smoot, the bridge length ruler. I also firmly believe I'm related to Nobel-laureate Dr. George Smoot and have nothing to do with that loser, Senator Reed Smoot.
Not that I let my personal preferences influence my conclusions. No, who'd do that?
FWIW, Oliver's son attended MIT a few years after I did. I can only imagine how much he got pestered about it.
“Most academic research has no lasting presence.” Cut funding, cut funding, cut funding. Move to Substack. Let’s move toward a system in which customers are directly paying teachers and researchers. If you can’t satisfy your customers find another profession.
I don't understand why Levitt would see a future of irrelevance for economics. It seems to me he's right in the middle of a worthwhile future along with Thaler, Kahnemann, Mulligan, and others who look at very practical questions.
Tyler did not allow comments on the non-binary gender economics post—a wise decision!
I suppose that's true even though it was really short and I didn't see anything I thought was controversial.
“And I really feel like our field has moved towards technicality. Harder proofs.” Likewise with other academic fields. How many interpretations of Shakespeare do we need? I say we need to cut funding. There is too much research that no one cares about or reads. Let’s get back to the fundamentals and start working on real problems.
I don't see any reason to cut finding in total. As you hint, the question is a matter of what should be funded.
Note: Funding the right things can be a very difficult proposition. I was at a rather broadly focused govt research lab. One of my coworkers was a physicist who did EMP security. Funding was winding down when I started work there and it came back once ~20 years later. It is impossible to maintain in-house expertise under those conditions. Lots of other research suffered similar fates.
How about gradual, prudent cuts annually across the board? 5% per year? In parallel ensure that legislation is not hindering private markets from filling in where needed. Defense spending too?
“I was a data scientist who was messing around with data…” Playing with and presenting data is fun. We all go through this phase and it probably never stops being fun.
That is a rather more telling sentence than one might think. There is a bit of a… slur maybe?… that most economists are just failed math majors. That most have no idea of how economies work, or even how people and businesses work, but just push numbers around like it is telling and call it economics. Here’s someone at the top of the profession in many respects openly saying that is exactly what he was. That is quite significant to me.
Let me read it again in full. “I just absolutely got converted to the power of Chicago thinking. It really, as I heard people like Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy and everyone talking, it just made sense to me. It was a different version of the world. There's a more serious economic application. I wasn't an economist at MIT. I was a data scientist who was messing around with data….once I got to Chicago, I began writing completely different kinds of papers. And it was very influential and I never left.” I’m not clear how old he is at MIT. Let’s see…He received his PhD in ‘94 and started at Chicago in ‘97, so he was still green at MIT. He might just be referring to himself. He’s trying to point to a better economics at Chicago, and it’s not clear if he’s throwing all MIT economists under the bus. Good question though. Maybe he will clarify in the future.
Not just MIT, almost all economists follow the MIT model of “do more math”. You can’t get papers published without a fairly complicated mathematical model these days, and for the past twenty years or so. Finding an economics paper published in a mainstream journal without a mathematical treatment is like finding a unicorn (or possibly an ideological paen) no matter how unnecessary it is to communicate the idea.
But as Thaler and Kahnemann (and others?) show, you can get the econ Nobel without math.
Do you think he is being unfair?
No, if anything he isn't going far enough. Professional economics has been in a poor state for a while, rapidly approaching rock bottom of late. The universities in general have been going downhill, of course, but in a different way economics went from a discipline of its own to being essentially applied mathematics. Even beyond questions of "Where would Adam Smith publish today?" it isn't clear that Hayek or J.S. Mill would be able to get published. There was a notable survey of economists a couple of years back regarding what they thought were the most important papers for advancing economics; none of their answers were post 1990 as I recall. Now that might be because all the important work was pretty much done by then and past that it was just application of principles, but I rather doubt that was the case. As others (Kling I am pretty sure was one) have pointed out, nothing done to deal with the 2008 crash could be found in any theory or textbook case of how the Fed should react. Modern Monetary Theory is strangely popular but basically madness from an economic theory perspective. It seems to me that people calling themselves economists have largely abandoned economic theory in favor of doing math that suggests their preferred course of action is the right one.
But then I am a pessimist and like to see things work, and don't have much respect for people who claim to know how things work but remain unable to make it so.
“No, if anything he isn't going far enough.” Glad to read this.
If you listen to him talk enough I think it would be hard to be surprised he said something like this. It's his nature. Like all of us, he has some quirks. This fits right in.
“My main memory of teaching was how weak the students were in math.” Hahaha