Don’t bother learning about this one, unless you already know what I am talking about
You know, the job market, the tweets, and the RCT, here is a complaint from Christopher Phelan. Here is the paper. I’ll just make a few points in hit and run fashion:
1. I am not convinced IRBs should have a say in this kind of matter, one way or the other. (I do think they should stop professors from injecting patients with syphilis.) In that sense I am not upset that this proceeded.
2. Given current standards (I would prefer much weaker IRBs), I don’t think this experiment should have been approved. It corrupts a process of evaluation.
3. Consider my behavior at MR. As you may know, every job market season I blog quite a few job market papers, and usually I will say or at least imply something positive about the candidate and the work. (As an aside, I suppose I now think this helps them, and I was not sure before.) I take this process very seriously, and try to look at as many job candidate web sites and papers as possible. Toward this end, I also will look at schools of management and public policy schools, as well as large numbers of schools outside the top ten. I wouldn’t randomize this process for the purposes of conducting an experiment. I feel that would be unfair to the candidates, unfair to MR readers, and somehow ever so slightly corrupting the integrity of the economics job market. I know my tastes are weird! But they are my true tastes, and I want my readers to know that. I would not have participated in this experiment. In fact, I feel the experiment is ever so slightly impugning the integrity of which papers I choose to cover, because some readers might think I too am a randomizer in the fashion of this experiment.
I don’t think “learning something about the job market” suffices to make up for these problems.
4. As a practical matter, the experiment shows us that you can do relatively well looking for talent in some new or unusual places. I agree, and Daniel Gross and I pushed that theme in our book on talent.
5. If you have read this far, I hope you heeded the title of this post.