Fly on the (economist grad student) wall

The following is an email exchange I had with my advisor. I was troubled by what I saw being published - naive idiot, yes - and railed against it in my typical juvenile fashion. 

Here's me:

"There appears to be some link between (leading article published by leading researcher in top journal) and (not so leading researcher publishing in a close to the top journal)

Another reason (yet another…) why writing this stuff out is making all these parallels come out. I decided to quickly go over the main points of the (leading researcher) paper – just scanning the introduction and the final discussion, conclusion bits – and here’s what I find...(some details)

 Wow. Not only is this missing out on the central message of the model, what message is coming out is also (apparently) incorrect.

Sometimes this kind of stuff troubles me; if one the leading experts is writing confusedly what does this say about the profession? Forget about being right or wrong, surely one should at least get the basic point of a paper…"

 

Here's advisor:

"You would be surprised how common it is for economists (even prominent economists) to misunderstand each others' work.  Papers aren't always 100% clear, and people are busy, so they read quickly.  And being a leading expert doesn't necessarily mean that you understand others' work any better.  You become a leading expert by publishing a lot, not necessarily by reading a lot.  In general, knowing what other work is being done helps a lot in writing good papers.  But that doesn't mean you need a perfect understanding.  And there are a lot of people who are good at doing original research and writing good papers, but not at all good at understanding others' work.

 

There are a few ways to tell based on CVs who is likely to be good at understanding others' work.  People who have substantial experience as journal editors tend to be in that category, for example.  So do people who look "overplaced" -- they have a relatively thin CV for the department they're in.  Look for the opposite cases -- people who are prominent but haven't done much journal editing, and people who look "underplaced" -- and those tend to be the people who aren't good at understanding others' work.  Of course, those aren't perfect indicators (particularly the over/underplaced measure).

 

Anyway, don't let this trouble you too much.  Errors like this do tend to get corrected eventually (though it sometimes takes a while)."

 

People are going to screw up. Even the well regarded ones. Takes the pressure off. In fact, I have only documented more of this sort of writing - confusing at best, incorrect at worst - so much so that I have virtually given up any hope of a general understanding being reached. But this is perhaps inevitable; an outcome of a process where freedom to question is generally allowed. Incorrect or misleading statements will happen. One must tolerate this, otherwise you end up being a servant of thought, not its master.