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The best journal in the discipline picks its best papers
最佳学术期刊选出最佳论文
Feb 24th 2011 | from the print edition
ONE hundred years ago, in March 1911, the American Economic Review (AER) published its first article—on irrigation in the “sun-blistered” deserts of the western United States. The article described how the “fervid suns of May and June” melted “vast beds of snow and ice”, so that “springs and torrents rush down to the lowlands” and “the rivers overflow their banks”.
It is fair to say that the journal’s prose style has rushed downhill since those first lyrical pages. But if the AER’s opening article ranks among the best-written in the review’s history, it does not rank among the best. To mark its centenary issue, the journal asked six eminent economists to trawl through the thousands of papers that followed and pick the top 20. The results, with links to all 20 papers, are available online.*
The links are worth clicking on. Many of these papers are more cited than read. They are known not by their full titles, but by the author-and-date shorthand (Modigliani and Miller, 1958; Friedman, 1968; Diamond and Mirrlees, 1971) used in references. Reading them in the original yields some pleasing rediscoveries.
Unsurprisingly, the list includes the 1955 paper by Simon Kuznets explaining why inequality might first rise then fall in the course of economic development. Surprisingly, nowhere in the paper did he actually draw the “Kuznets curve” that is now inseparable from his name. (He described the arc of inequality as a “long swing” instead.) Robert Mundell’s 1961 theory of “optimum currency areas”, which lays out the conditions for a workable currency union, is now often cited by the euro’s critics. Ironic, therefore, to note that Mr Mundell wrote the paper to show why flexible exchange rates were impractical because many nations are not optimal currency areas either. Should every local “pocket of unemployment” have a “separate currency”, he snorted.
With one or two exceptions, the chosen papers convey an impression of economics as a tidy, coherent discipline. The subjects covered are traditional: consumption, tax, currencies, inflation, that sort of thing. There are no excursions into sumo相扑 or intestinal worms. The furthest off-piste they go is Anne Krueger’s 1974 article on rent-seeking, explaining why people may lobby for governments to distort the economy.
The papers are not bereft of whimsy, but it is confined to footnotes and asides. A 1972 paper by Armen Alchian and Harold Demsetz, for example, describes how the firm evolved as an organisational form to prevent shirking in team production. A footnote explains why sportsmen do not shirk enough, overinvesting in their skills. (Teams care about coming top, as much as they care about being good, so if teams collectively agreed to lower their standards, they could achieve the same league rankings with less effort.) The two economists also explain why professors get away with “turpitudinal peccadillos” like stealing office stationery.
This consensus on the proper subject of economics also extends to method. The chosen economists mostly go about their business in a consistent way, refining, extending or occasionally bending a shared framework of analysis. Some of them make their colleagues’ lives easier by suggesting convenient tricks and techniques to make a theory testable (such as the consumer-demand equations set out in 1980 by Angus Deaton and John Muellbauer), to make a notion easy to model (see the 1977 paper by Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz on differentiated products and increasing returns to scale) or both (the production function pioneered in 1928 by Charles Cobb and the inimitable Paul Douglas).
Several papers spot a real-world phenomenon that sits uneasily with the discipline’s ruling assumptions. Why do people in developing countries leave undermanned farms to languish in urban unemployment, for example? The papers then show that one or two tweaks to the assumptions can bring the problem to heel—in this instance, the artificially high wages paid by city jobs offset the smaller chance of landing one.
Thirty-somethings
三十余年来……
The most recent entry to the top 20 is Robert Shiller’s 1981 paper documenting the excessive volatility of stock prices. Nothing else in the past 30 years made the cut—even though submissions to the AER have swelled in that time and its acceptance rate has plunged. Douglas Bernheim, one of the six pop-pickers, says that each of them would probably have included “at least a couple of more recent papers” on their list. “But as we move from older to younger papers, assessments vary more from person to person.”
Why is this? Mr Bernheim points out that younger papers are less time-tested. Economists can only forecast their worth, and these forecasts are rarely convincing enough to supplant one of the proven classics on the list. According to this view, some recent papers will eventually earn broad admiration. It is simply a question of time.
But perhaps it is also a question of the times. Economics has fragmented in the past 15-20 years, both in subject and technique. No aspect of human behaviour is off-limits and a miscellany of methods are in vogue, adding laboratory experiments, randomised trials and computer simulations to the traditionalist’s blackboard and chalk. Many of the brightest stars in economics parade their scepticism, insisting on how little economists really know (or indeed how little real economics they know). The discipline is more exciting, ingenious and intrepid as a result. But it is also unruly and untidy. Some economists are still patiently adding to a cairn of knowledge. Many are throwing rocks.
It is harder than ever to keep abreast of progress. After running four issues a year for the past 100 years, the AER will this year publish six. The journal has already produced four specialised offshoots. Economics is producing a torrent of research, coursing in all directions. The rivers have overflowed their banks.
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