Christine Exley the Economic Rockstar

The latest edition of Economic Rockstar Podcast features Christine Exley of the Harvard Business School. Among other things, she talks about how she came to study economics at the University of Mary Washington.

Disruption Disrupted

The Chronicle of Higher Education examines challenges to Clay Christensen’s theory of disruption. His The Innovator’s Dilemma has become one of the bestselling and most influential books on business strategy.  The historian Jill Lepore wrote an interesting critique of Christensen’s work   for the New Yorker last year. Now, Andrew King  and Baljir Baatartogtokh have a new paper in MIT Sloan Management Review, asking “How Useful is the Theory of Disruptive Innovation?” King and Brent Goldlfarb also have evidence of broader problems in empirical research in management (the problem they examine is not unique to management research). The Chronicle article is interesting both on the specific issue of Christensen’s theory but also on the difficulty King faced in publishing  a challenge to Christensen’s work:

“King and Tucci presented their findings at a conference in 1999. King recalls sitting at a restaurant soon after and a well-known figure in the field approached, shook his hand, and said, "You’re the guy who burst Christensen’s bubble." But it didn’t turn out that way. "We wrote a couple of papers, which we had to tone down a little bit because of the referees," says Tucci. The paper — working title: "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong." — was too polemical, they were told. When it finally appeared in Management Science, in 2002, the article had been smothered in theory and jargon. The published title: "Incumbent Entry Into New Market Niches: The Role of Experience and Managerial Choice in the Creation of Dynamic Capabilities." As Brent Goldfarb, an associate professor of management at the University of Maryland business school and friend of King, says, "You have to look really hard to realize King and Tucci slaughtered Christensen." - See more at: http://chronicle.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/article/The-Undoing-of-Disruption/233101/#sthash.LUXodkFg.dpuf

The historian's craft and economics

My paper (with Mary Eschelbach Hansen) “The historian’s craft and economics” is now available on First View at the Journal of Institutional Economics:

Abstract

History refers both to the past and to the systematic study of the past. Attempts to make a case for history in economics generally emphasize the first definition. There are benefits from increased attention to the past. This paper argues that significant benefits can be gained from increased attention to the systematic study of the past, the historian's craft. The essence of the historian's craft is the critical evaluation of sources. Failure to critically evaluate sources has the potential to lead to erroneous conclusions, whether one is using historical documents or more recently created data.

Economics really needs better critics

Per Byland recently complained that economists had killed economics

“What we have seen over the course of the last eighty years is a systematic dismantling of the contribution of economics to our understanding of the social world. Whatever the cause, modern economics is now not much more than formal modeling using mathematics dressed up in economics-sounding lingo."

I’m not sure that Bylund and Michael Lind would agree on much, but Lind also has seen the destruction of economics

 “Before World War II, economics — the field which had replaced the older “political economy” — was contested between neoclassical economics, which sought to model the economy with the methods of physics, and the much more sensible and empirically-oriented school of institutional economics. Another name for institutional economics was the Historical School. After 1945, the institutional economics associated in the U.S. with John Kenneth Galbraith was purged from American economics faculties, in favor of the “freshwater” (Chicago) and “saltwater” (MIT) versions of mathematical economics, which focused on trying to model the economy using equations as though it were a fluid or a gas.”

Either Bylund and Lind are completely out of touch with what economists are doing now or I am. Their critique of economics is an old one. I’m not sure it ever really applied, but it does not now. The American Economic Review and other top journals are full of empirical research, not lots of new papers about General Equilibrium.   

What sort of work do economists admire? Here are the John Bates Clark medalists since 1990. How many are known as pure theorists and how many are known for the empirical research?

1991	Paul R. Krugman	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
1993	Lawrence H. Summers	Worldbank	United States
1995	David Card	Princeton University	Canada
1997	Kevin M. Murphy	University of Chicago	United States
1999	Andrei Shleifer	Harvard University	United States
2001	Matthew Rabin	University of California, Berkeley	United States
2003	Steven Levitt	University of Chicago	United States
2005	Daron Acemoğlu	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	Turkey United States
2007	Susan C. Athey	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
2009	Emmanuel Saez	University of California, Berkeley	France
2010	Esther Duflo	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	France
2011	Jonathan Levin	Stanford University	United States
2012	Amy Finkelstein	Massachusetts Institute of Technology	United States
2013	Raj Chetty	Harvard University	United States
2014	Matthew Gentzkow	University of Chicago	United States
2015	Roland G. Fryer, Jr.	Harvard University	United States

Bylund and Lind seem to think that economists all aspire to be Samuelson, Arrow or Debreu. Yes formal models with lots of imposing math are still to be found, but more often than not they lead in to empirical research.

Are there things that economist can do better? Yes. I, for instance wish that economists would give as much attention to the evidence that they use as they do to the formal model and the choice of econometric techniques. On the topic, Mary and I have a paper on “The Historian’s Craft and Economics” that I am happy to say was just accepted by Journal of Institutional Economics. I also wish they would give more attention to history generally, but I’m not really an unbiased source on that topic. 

Micro economic history and some digital history too

William Easterly, Laura Freschi and Steven Pennings argue for the benefits of micro economic history of development by examining the development of one block in lower Manhattan over more than three hundred years. They have produced a fascinating paper and website.

Round table on Edward Baptist's Half has Never Been Told

The September Journal of Economic History has a round table of reviews of Edward Baptist’s book The Half Has Never Been told, with reviews by Alan Olmstead, Jonathan Pritchett, Trevon Logan and Peter Rousseau. They each address different aspects of the way that Baptist misrepresents the historiography of American slavery and makes things up. Thanks to Alan Olmstead for mentioning one of my blog posts on the book. Many of the points noted in these reviews  are similar to ones that I and Pseudoerasmus made about the book shortly after it came out, around the same time it was getting glowing reviews in places like the New York Times Book Reviews. I found Logan’s review particularly interesting when it stepped away from what is typically thought of as economic history. He concludes

  

I think as an economic historian I was so offended by the books portrayal of economic historians I may have missed some of the bigger problems. 

Tariffs and the Civil War, or 95% of All Statistics Are Made Up

A recent letter to the editor of our local paper argued that secession and the Civil War were caused by high tariffs not slavery. The Confederate states were rebelling against high taxes and big government. Apparently, they were really just Reagan Republicans or maybe even libertarians (slaveholding libertarians). The author of the letter made the claim that the South paid 75 percent of the tariff revenue in 1859. I thought the claim was so outrageous  he must have just made it up. It turns out you can find this claim all over the internet. It turns out it even has academic credentials behind it. Some people attribute it to Walter Williams, but he appears to have gotten it from Thomas Di Lorenzo, who attributed it to Frank Taussig’s The Tariff History of the United States. Di Lorenzo, however, did not provide a page citation. I suspect that he did not provide a page citation because one does not exist. If someone can find this in Taussig please let me know.

In any case, it is not true that most revenue came from Southern ports. A small fraction of tariff revenue came from Southern ports. In 1860 the Secretary of the Treasury reported the amount of revenue collected in each collection district between 1854 and 1859. (Sen. Ex. Doc. No. 33 36^th Congress 1^st Session). Looking at 1857, for instance, one finds that total revenue was $64,171,034. Most of the revenue, $42,510,753, came as it did every year from a single port: New York. The most important port in the South was New Orleans, which brought in a little more than $3 million, less than half as much as Boston. Southern ports were not even close to being the most important source of revenue.

There is no mystery as to why Southern states seceded. They issued secession proclamations explaining their actions. South Carolina was the first to secede, and the state’s proclamation does not mention tariffs. It is entirely about the perceived threat to slavery. It declares that 

“A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.” 

Apparently we are to believe that they were simply hiding their true motivation, opposition to tariffs. I wish modern defenders of the Confederacy were as honest as its original defenders.