All Errors Are My Own

by John Duffy

“What if your friends jumped off a cliff: would you do it too?” My parents frequently invoked this clichéd but impossible-to-refute logic to rebut my desires for the perceived freedoms of my childhood friends. It did not have much effect. I have begun the cycle anew, using the same tired line on my own kids with pretty much the same results. A more promising audience for this logic might be the academicians who, along with me, practice the dismal science of economics.

As someone interested in "behavioral economics", I have been unable to avoid mentally cataloging the behavioral quirks of some of my lemming-like economist brethren. Many of my colleagues would regard these quirks as professional norms of behavior but they look to me like cracks in the foundation of scholarly dispassion. While I would like to think that I am not the kind of oaf I make fun of here, it takes one to know one.

Here then, is my list of some of the follies, foibles and do-not-dos of academic economists. My motivations for writing these down and posting them f.o.c. on the web should be suspect. If they make you laugh or (even better) lead to a change in your behavior let me know and I’ll collect a few utils.

1. Recency bias. The standard template for the first few sentences of an economics paper emphasizes the currency of the topic matter:

“Recently there has been much work on topic X (cite unpublished papers no more than 1 year old here). Surprisingly, no one has thought about Y. In this paper, I include Y in X and get E=mc².”

The desire to be doing with-it research seems reminiscent of schoolyard desires to be “in” with the “in-crowd”. Since academics are all still in school, the recency

bias is probably just a grownup version of the same youthful desire to be in with the others.

2. The acknowledgement of errors and the desire to possess them. In the first footnote to a paper (which for some strange reason is attached to the paper’s title), economist authors thank all the people who gave comments or grunted something about their paper. These hosannas always come with the qualification that those being thanked are in no way responsible for any errors made by the author(s). Errors in the paper! Heavens to Betsy, why would you ever want to acknowledge that? Even more ridiculous is the often-seen disclaimer: “all errors are my own.” Here the author not only acknowledges that the paper may contain errors, s/he also takes possession of them, while giving credit to others for shaping the ideas. Bizarre!

3. Don’t ask, don’t quote disorder. Some economists like to threaten their readers with the following warning slapped on the front page of their papers like some kind of press release embargo:

Do not quote without the permission of the author.

This is just laughable, especially since most papers with this warning are posted on the world wide web (emphasis is my own). One is lucky in life if people pay any attention to you at all, let alone quote what you have to say. Why discourage them from doing so? The do-not-quote-me-without-asking-me-first line appears either because the author is unsure of the proof of Lemma 12 and doesn’t want to get slapped down or, more likely, because some other dolt used that same line and the author thought it looked cool. Neither explanation inspires confidence.

4. Consider the following pretension. This one always make me flinch. To preface your remarks by saying “consider the following” in print or-- heaven forbid-- out loud, is not only a complete waste of ink/breath, it’s a “heads up” to others to get out the bag for catching wind.

5. Fear of losing the audience. In papers, and increasingly in seminar presentations, economists provide a roadmap or outline of where they are going, perhaps out of fear that their audience would not otherwise travel with them. In written papers, one often finds a paragraph at the end of the introduction that reads something like this:

“In the next section we present the model. After that we show existence and uniqueness, followed by applications. The final section concludes.”

In seminars, especially junior recruiting seminars, the trend is to put up an “outline of the talk” and every so often a slide indicating which section of the talk we are now in. This reminds me of the title cards used is silent movies and would be useful if I were not, in fact, watching a “talkie.”

6. Dilettante disease. Economics is a young science and it seems that many economists are working hard to keep it that way. Rather than mine a rich vein of research on a single topic, they dabble in this field and drivel in some other. A cheap trick is to say that your theoretical treatise, “mechanism design for pawn brokers” is: “but a small first step in what I hope will be an extensive literature” (or at least one that repeatedly heralds you as its progenitor). Of course, the impossible or uninteresting second, third and higher steps are left for the acolytes.

Well, that’s my list of maladies for now. I’m sure to encounter more of these any day now and if I do, I’ll add them to list. Feel free to email me with suggestions.