8 highlights
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The more common responses of lower-status academics, of course, are jealousy and laziness. Jealousy, because faculty at higher-ranked schools so out-shine the rest of us. Laziness, because deep-down faculty at lower-ranked schools know they lack the skills to do real research. Most aren’t even good enough to usefully, if humbly, extend the work of their betters.
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Call it sour grapes, but I don’t respond to my situation in any of these ways. With rare exceptions, I don’t admire researchers at top schools – or try to humbly build on their work. At the same time, I’m not lazy. And in all sincerity, I am not jealous.
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Why not? To be blunt, I deny the value of almost all of the social science research going on at top schools. My reaction to 95% of the articles published in top economics journals isn’t so much “That’s wrong!” as “So what?”
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Unless you believe in the Labor Theory of Value, however, the cost of creating top publications implies nothing about the value of creating top publications.
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When I was in grad school, economists won big for pure – and utterly irrelevant – mathematical theory. These days, economists win big for running bullet-proof randomized controlled trials on trivial topics.
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False modesty aside, I judge my work better than most of the work done by researchers at top schools. Indeed, I judge my work to be vastly superior. That’s why I do it.
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I say struggling with a great question is better than definitively answering a trivial one. And since I predictably think my books actually deliver high-quality answers to these great questions, my sense of self-satisfaction with my intellectual output is through the roof.
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Instead of feeling mad at the world, I rejoice that I get paid to do the work that means the world to me.