Statement of Commitment to Academic Freedom and to Intellectual Merit
Academic freedom and intellectual merit are under attack in the United States, from both the left and the right. The norms of the university and intellectual life are fragile and need protecting because such norms are always in tension with political and economic power.
The undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics express their commitment to academic freedom and to intellectual merit.
Addressed to the George Mason University (GMU) community and the public at large
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American universities have professed allegiance to two ideals. First, the ideal of academic freedom – the right of students and faculty to express any idea in speech or writing, without fear of university punishment, and secure in the knowledge that the university will protect dissenters from threats and violence on campus.
Second, the ideal of intellectual merit – the right and duty of academic departments to hire and promote the most brilliant, creative, and productive faculty in their fields, and admit the most intellectually promising students, without pressures from the administration.
These ideals are the cornerstones of liberal education. They protect faculty and students who hold views unpopular on university campuses. Academic freedom protects existing students and faculty who dissent from current dominant academic opinion and ideology. No matter how unpopular their views, they know the university will protect them. As stated in the University of Chicago Statement on freedom of expression and as quoted in GMU’s “Free Speech at Mason” Statement:
[We must hold a fundamental commitment to] the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.
Intellectual merit protects prospective students and faculty who speak and write against current dominant viewpoints. No matter how unpopular their views, they know that university administration will not obstruct or prejudice their admission, hiring, or promotion.
Recently, both of these ideals have come under attack. Pressure for conformity has intensified and universities have increasingly interfered with departments’ personnel decisions. For example, at some universities, one of the more egregious new practices is the requiring of written “diversity” statements by prospective students, staff, or faculty, then used to discriminate among candidates, often by quarters of the university with interests other than those of the department or unit. Such methods recall arrogations of the past, such as The Levering Act of 1950, used against radicals.
We strongly believe the attacks on academic freedom and intellectual merit are deeply mistaken. The classic rationales in favor of these ideals are sound. To protect them, viewpoint diversity must be celebrated and academic departments must maintain their ability to select, hire, and promote students and personnel based on intellectual merit. We insist that the degree of institutional autonomy that the GMU Department of Economics has traditionally enjoyed is vital to the health of viewpoint diversity not only within the university but within the academy writ large.
It is vital that every department in a university enjoys independence, so it can dare to be different and keep viewpoint diversity alive. George Mason University has excelled in supporting viewpoint diversity with a variety of diverse departments, centers and organizations. Viewpoint diversity at George Mason has benefited the university, the United States, and the wider intellectual world.
Indeed, some of the Department’s chief contributions have taught that all forms of authority can exert power to excess, and that guarding against such excess calls for the very ideals affirmed here, respect for dissent and intellectual merit.
We, the undersigned members of the GMU Department of Economics, look forward to continuing our independence to do good economics according to our judgment, guided by the ideals of academic freedom and intellectual merit.
Signed by the following GMU Department of Economics faculty (full-time & emeritus):
1. Jonathan P. Beauchamp
2. James T. Bennett
3. Donald J. Boudreaux
4. Bryan D. Caplan
5. Vincent J. Geloso
6. Timothy Groseclose
7. Robin D. Hanson
8. Garett Jones
9. Daniel B. Klein
10. Mark Koyama
11. David M. Levy
12. Cesar A. Martinelli
13. John V.C. Nye
14. Thomas C. Rustici
15. Vernon L. Smith
16. Alex Tabarrok
17. Karen I. Vaughn
18. Richard E. Wagner
19. Lawrence H. White
Who are the individuals you admire most?
Let’s run the 2015 MR poll once again:
Yesterday a few of you asked me to run this poll. Please leave your answers in the comments, I will report back. I thank you all in advance for the wisdom of your responses. And please restrict your answers to living people, or say anyone who has passed away in the last five years, so this should be about contemporaries, not Joan of Arc or Einstein.
Comments are open…
Semaglutide, Ozempic, and the end of the Great Stagnation
I am no expert on this weight loss drug, but many people on both the bio side and the VC side are telling me it works. Might it, or some variant thereof, become the best-selling drug of all time?
Just think that within five years we likely will have come up with good, serious remedies to Covid, to obesity (a major, major public health problem, especially in America), to malaria, and to dengue, vaccines in the latter two cases. And that is unlikely to be the end of the list.
That is an astonishing record, and we are truly living in a golden age for biomedicine. Ozempic is further evidence that the great stagnation is over, even though the current world is not mimicking the physical dynamism of say the 1920s.
Is Economics Self-Correcting?
The subtitle of that article is Replications in the American Economic Review, and the authors are Jörg Ankel-Peters, Nathan Fiala, and Florian Neubauer. Here is the abstract:
Replication and constructive controversy are essential for scientific progress. This paper reviews the impact of all replications published as comments in the American Economic Review between 2010 and 2020. We investigate the citation rates of comments and whether a comment affects its original paper’s citation rates. We find that most comments are barely cited, and they have no impact on the original papers’ subsequent citations. This finding holds for original papers for which the comment diagnoses a substantive problem. We conclude from these citation patterns that replications do not update the economics literature. In an online opinion survey, we elicited viewpoints of both comment authors and original authors and find that in most cases, there is no consensus regarding the replication’s success and to what extent the original paper’s contribution sustains. This resonates with the conventional wisdom that robustness and replicability are hard to define in economics.
If you see a critical comment in the AER, the odds that it is correct, and significantly so, are really pretty high, given the barriers to getting in. Yet no one seems to care. (Note that the lack of caring is connected to the Bayesian inference that the published critical comments likely are correct.) This is to me one of the more significant indictments of the economics professions as we know it today. And it is not obvious how we might change this state of affairs.
Here is the argument in tweet storm form.
Sunday assorted links
1. ChatGPT fails the Indian civil service exam.
2. Paul Krugman on inflation (NYT).
4. The Waluigi Effect. Recommended.
5. Is European regionalism dead? (scroll down)
Smart phones and their problems
As Noah Smith points out in his recent Substack, smart phones are conceptually distinct from social media. To some (modest) extent, it might be smart phones making young (and old?) people unhappy.
Speaking on a purely subjective level, I hate smart phones. Better yet, I hate phones.
I love my iPad, and now once again I have two of them. Apart from disliking phone calls, the iPhone itself frustrates me. It is simply too small to make me happy. I don’t like looking at it, and I use it instead of the iPad only in very restricted situations, such as the iPad being on the other side of the room and the iPhone still being in my pocket.
Have you noticed that no one can call you on your iPad? Well, actually they can, but not the way I have it set up.
It is also bulkier to take out the iPad and hold it and use it. That limits the number of times you check it, relative to an iPhone.
So maybe an iPad-based world would be somewhat healthier, mentally and otherwise. The more general point is that we might be able to improve the psychological architecture of iPhones.
As a side query, if social media on iPhones are a harmful addiction, why do we observe so few attempts to quit them? Why do we observe relatively few self-constraint devices for social media use?
Dollars, dollars, everywhere…
As if the dual currency exchange is not enough to contend with, Argentina has around 15 different exchange rates, including a “soy dollar” for soy exports, a “Qatar dollar” for Argentine tourists travelling to the World Cup last year, and even the “Coldplay dollar”, a special exchange rate for paying foreign entertainers that made a name for itself when the band had a string of sellout concerts last year.
Here is more from the FT, via Tom V.,
Dan Wang’s 2022 year in review
One of the highlights of any year, here is the letter, part about Yunnan, part about Chinese locksdowns, but this time only a smidgen about music, and much more. Here is an excerpt:
The situation worsened if one tested positive. A trip to a centralized quarantine facility (often a bed in a convention center) would await. That was sometimes the least concern. The city’s policy was to separate children from their parents if either tested positive; fear of separation drove parents mad with worry, until an outcry prompted the city to drop the policy. Dog-owners who couldn’t find another household willing to host their pet had to decide whether to leave it alone at home for the duration of their illness; or let it loose outside and hope for the best. (A viral video of a health worker beating a corgi to death with a shovel did not help to make the decision easier.) A positive test would summon cleaning staff into one’s home, who could soak everything—clothes, books, furniture—in disinfectant…
Psychologically, the most difficult thing was that no one knew how long the lockdown would last: a few days or a few weeks more. Every so often a video would circulate that purported to show someone who jumped from a balcony. Friends spoke about three types of shock. First, the raw novelty of extended physical confinement. Second, the wonder of feeling food insecure in this age and in this city. Third, a disenchantment with government pronouncements. Many people kicked themselves for trusting officials who said that Shanghai would impose no lockdown. They saw how positive cases in their own neighborhoods would be absent from the city’s data releases. And they shared a recording of a health official who said that these controls were unscientific.
And:
But life in Yunnan was much better than being in the big cities last year. “Far from being seen as a regrettable backsliding and privation,” Scott writes: “becoming a barbarian may have produced a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order.”
I advocate for departing from the court center too. So it’s time to say: it’s a barbarian’s life for me.
Dan Wang — very highly rated but still underrated!
Saturday assorted links
Uh-oh, reverse Flynn effect edition
A reverse Flynn effect was found for composite ability scores with large US adult sample from 2006 to 2018 and 2011 to 2018.
Domain scores of matrix reasoning, letter and number series, verbal reasoning showed evidence of declining scores.
Three-dimensional rotation scores generally increased from 2011 to 2018.
Differences in ability scores were present regardless of age, education, or gender.
The steepest slopes occurred for ages 18–22 and lower levels of education.
That is from a new paper by Elizabeth M. Dworak, William Revelle, and David M. Condon. Alex T. comments.
Home bias in top economics journals
Two of the top economics journals have institutional ties to a specific university, the Quarterly Journal of Economics (QJE) to Harvard University and the Journal of Political Economy (JPE) to the University of Chicago. Researchers from Harvard, but also nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and from Chicago (co-)author a disproportionate share of articles in their respective home journal. Such home ties and publication bias may harm, but also benefit, article quality. We study this question in a difference-in-differences framework, using data on both current and past author affiliations and cumulative citation counts for articles published between 1995 and 2015 in the QJE, JPE, and American Economic Review (AER), which serves as a benchmark. We find that median article quality is lower in the QJE if authors have ties to Harvard and/or MIT than if authors are from other top-10 universities, but higher in the JPE if authors have ties to Chicago. We also find that home ties matter for the odds of journals to publish highly influential and low impact papers. Again, the JPE appears to benefit, if anything, from its home ties, while the QJE does not.
That is from a new paper by Dirk Bethmann, Felix Bransch, Michael Kvasnicka, and Abdolkarim Sadrieh.
Earnings Are Greater and Increasing in Occupations That Require Intellectual Tenacity
That is the title of a new paper by Christos Makridis, Louis Hickman, and Benjamin Manning, here is the abstract:
Automation and technology are rapidly disrupting the labor market. We investigated changes in the returns to occupational personality requirements—the ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that enable success in a given occupation—and the resulting implications for organizational strategy. Using job incumbent ratings from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET), we identify two broad occupational personality requirements, which we label intellectual tenacity and social adjustment. Intellectual tenacity encompasses achievement/effort, persistence, initiative, analytical thinking, innovation, and independence. Social adjustment encompasses emotion regulation, concern for others, social orientation, cooperation, and stress tolerance. Both occupational personality requirements relate similarly to occupational employment growth between 2007 and 2019. However, among over 10 million respondents to the American Community Survey, jobs requiring intellectual tenacity pay higher wages—even controlling for occupational cognitive ability requirements—and the earnings premium grew over this 13-year period. Results are robust to controlling for education, demographics, and industry effects, suggesting that organizations should pay at least as much attention to personality in the hiring and retention process as skills.
Of course that is very much accord with some of the claims Daniel Gross and I make in our book on talent. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
What should I ask David Bentley Hart?
I will be doing a Conversation with him. David Gordon claims the guy has read more than David Gordon! Here is Wikipedia:
David Bentley Hart (born 1965) is an American writer, philosopher, religious studies scholar, critic, and Orthodox theologian noted for his distinctive, humorous, pyrotechnic and often combative prose style. With academic works published on Christian metaphysics, philosophy of mind, classics, Asian languages, and literature, Hart received the Templeton Fellowship at the University of Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study in 2015 and organized a conference focused on the philosophy of mind. His translation of the New Testament was published by Yale in 2017 with a 2nd edition in 2023.
A prolific essayist, Hart has written on topics as diverse as art, baseball, literature, religion, philosophy, consciousness, problem of evil, apocatastasis, theosis, fairies, film, and politics. His fiction includes The Devil and Pierre Gernet: Stories (2012) as well as two books from 2021: Roland in Moonlight and Kenogaia (A Gnostic Tale). Hart also maintains a subscription newsletter called Leaves in the Wind that features original essays and conversations with other writers such as Rainn Wilson, China Miéville, Tariq Goddard, and Salley Vickers. Hart’s friendship and substantial intellectual common ground with John Milbank has been noted several times by both thinkers.
So what should I ask him?
Friday assorted links
1. Eric Topol on the new breakthrough obesity drugs.
2. A taxonomy of Mexico City horns.
3. The polity that is Florida.
4. Air Force OKs hand and neck tattoos.
5. Good David Brooks piece on the importance of the arts (NYT).
6. Scaling automatic speech recognition beyond 100 languages. And reconstructing visual images from human brain activity. As I’ve been telling you, advances every single day.
So what is the right-wing pathology then?
Recently I discussed the connection between high neuroticism and left-wing politics. In passing I mentioned that the right-wing had its own problems, leading a few of you to ask what those were.
The classic response would be to accuse (credit?) conservatives as being low in empathy. Whether or not you agree historically, that answer does not seem to me to be “of the moment.” Instead, I see the more recent right-wing thinkers as falling into a different camp. The pathology I observe most frequently and most intensely is a kind of reckless anger, directed at some semi-imaginary, hypostatized notion of “elites.” In an almost Pavlovian fashion, you can pump up this group by putting out some “bait” about “the elites” and seeing the resentment fly. To be clear, as with the left-wing, this pathology does not have to mean the right-wing thinkers are wrong on the issues themselves. After all, maybe Lab Leak did indeed happen, or whatever other claim you might wish to debate. But when one of these sensitive topics comes up, yes right-wing thinkers do often respond to it pathologically and with an excess of emotion. Born out of their sense of their own failures, they can be the true snowflakes.
You can see this in the comments section of MR every single day. Maybe even today. No surprise that the neurotic left-wingers will notice this and be disturbed by it!