Halloween: Too Scary

Wow.  Universities are some loco parents, huh?

University outlaws controversial (?) Halloween costumes.

I guess this means I have to take back my "Sexy Illegal Immigrant Kardashian Gardener" costume. 

Phil Schrodt on Retiring from PSU

Wow.  This is really something.  62?

Excerpt:

Unexpectedly, writing Seven Deadly Sins rendered me useless as a methodological  instructor. I am convinced that garbage can models are worthless, but in order to get tenure at any place worth getting tenure, you’ve got to publish garbage can models, and lots of garbage can models, and that is not going to change any time soon. In my former subdiscipline, the response to Achen’s 2002 critique of garbage can models was a journal-length methodological suicide note, Conflict Management and Peace Science Vol. 22, No.4. I’m not going to win that battle.

There is absolutely nothing worse than the stereotypical old fart in the cluttered office telling people “It’s all crap!!!”—while pulling down, year after year, a handsome if static salary—and I’m perilously close to that. In classical Chinese philosophy there is an oft-repeated motif of the sage who writes a book and then departs beyond the frontiers, never to be seen again. Perhaps 7DS is that [non-]book.

Economics: Older Authors, More Original Data

Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How?

Daniel Hamermesh
NBER Working Paper, December 2012

Abstract: Presenting data on all full-length articles published in the three top general economics journals for one year in each of the 1960s through 2010s, I analyze how patterns of co-authorship, age structure and methodology have changed, and what the possible causes of these changes may have been. The entire distribution of number of authors has shifted steadily rightward. In the last two decades the fraction of older authors has almost quadrupled. The top journals are now publishing many fewer papers that represent pure theory, regardless of sub-field, somewhat less empirical work based on publicly available data sets, and many more empirical studies based on data assembled for the study by the author(s) or on laboratory or field experiments.

I wonder if this is because the revolution in economics methods changed publication in the 1950s.  Or was it just the new emphasis on publication, at all, that has now reached steady state?  If that's true, then the new distribution is what we should expect, and the bias toward younger authors and low-hanging fruit data sets was short-lived.

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Publishing as a Craft

My post the other day created some pushback.

A former student here at Duke sent this response, mostly in agreement with my claims (not that my claims were original, either, by the way!)

Hi Mike, I wanted to send a quick note to say I appreciated your post today about difficult letters of recommendation, and what it takes to succeed in academia. As someone who is basically a parishioner in the Church of Munger, all I can say is "amen." (Also, as you wrote a letter for me I am sure I am one of the people who gave you fits as someone with promise but nothing to show for it yet. I probably still am). 

Please feel free to post or distribute these comments as you fit. Let stress some other reasons why sending out a lot of work--especially early in your career--is important. Net present value is a compelling argument. But, assume that people only care about doing good work and not about future earnings or even getting tenure. Writing a lot may be even more important for reasons unrelated to salary and tenure. You don't grow as a scholar if you are not working (normal family vacations aside). 

Main points after the jump...

Letter from Hugo Chavez

I have been waiting for a long time, months and months, to publish this little letter that came into my possession.  I had to wait long enough, and indefinitely enough, so that it would be harder to determine just who was the recipient.

A person who is on the faculty at a universidad in Venezuela applied for funding to travel abroad to a conference.  The funding was granted, and the person asked his/her bosses to approve the trip.  This was the letter that came back (I typed it out from a paper original, so forgive the lack of proper accents, and the misspellings):


Republica Bolivariana De Venezuela            (DATE)
Estimada y estimado compatriota
Tenga un saludo cordial y Revolucionario!
    Cumplimos con informarle que su solicitud no puede ser ni sera procesada por diferencias de pensamientos.  Esto es debido a que su proposito de estudio no servira para el beneficio de la nacion.
    Personas de su familia presenta expediente contra la revolucion, por lo tanto, debemos cuidar a la nacion de sus intenciones.
    Le recomendamos que enmiende su vincula con el Estado soberano para poder confiar en las intenciones y proposito de su preparacion en el exterior del pais.
    Sin mas que agregar, se despide ante de Comision Administracion de Divisas (CADIVI)

(Two Truly Enormous Quarter Page Signatures, Obviously Proud and Important Dignitaries)

Now, in my not very good Spanish, here is the (a?) translation.  (After the jump)

BEFORE THE JUMP UPDATE:  Got an email saying that the letter is a hoax.  So, don't go saying "I read this on the internet, so it must be true!"  It may not be.  I'm going to leave it up, though for its truthiness value...

Correlation is Causation?

Why are professors liberal?

Neil Gross & Ethan Fosse
Theory and Society, March 2012, Pages 127-168

Abstract: The political liberalism of professors - an important occupational group and anomaly according to traditional theories of class politics - has long puzzled sociologists. This article sheds new light on the subject by employing a two-step analytic procedure. In the first step, we assess the explanatory power of the main hypotheses proposed over the last half century
to account for professors' liberal views. To do so, we examine hypothesized predictors of the political gap between professors and other Americans using General Social Survey data pooled from 1974-2008. Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas. In the second step of our article, we develop a new theory of professors' politics on the basis of these findings (though not directly testable with our data) that we think holds more explanatory promise than existing approaches and that sets an agenda for future research.

Do you know what has long puzzled me? How someone can get a paper published simply by running a bunch of regressions of ideology on demographic characteristics, and then saying things like "Jewish causes liberal beliefs." This "two stage" thing described above...if the Onion published empirical papers, this might be a candidate.

All Hail R. K. Gaddie

There's a protest in his kitchen and he's telling the world: