Economist Writing Every Day

The EJMR paper presentation dropped at the NBER summer meetings. If you were a 90s kid who loved hacker movies, you were not disappointed. Some are worried it’s an exercise in doxxing (it isn’t). What I think is worth a bit more reflection is the “big reveal” that EJMR toxic posters were not limited to the periphery of the profession. Quite to the contrary, large swaths were matched to the IP addresses of elite universities. Besides disabusing people of the notion that toxic behavior and ideas might decrease with prestige, accomplishment, or intelligence, I think it serves as a healthy reminder that 1) Any anonymous message board will devolve into a cesspool if left unmoderated (see Law, Gresham’s) and, 2) Any status game can devolve into a negative sum game if left unmoderated.

Academia is a status tournament

From a purely careerist standpoint, academia is a long run status tournament built around rankings and tiers. It starts from the moment you apply to graduate schools, hoping to get into the highest ranked school. Some are admitted, some are not. Those admitted are sorted across tiers of schools. Once in a school there is the (sometimes true) perception that students are internally ranked, sorting to faculty advisors, projects, and data access. Some graduate, some leave early with a masters degree, some leave with nothing. Those who graduate are sorted into academic and non-academic jobs. Those that are pushed by the faculty on to the academic market sort into better and worse schools. The best prospects are swapped across the best schools (it’s generally uncouth to hire your own students, at least immediately). Once they are established in tenure track positions, the tournament continues in its least compressed, but also most heightened form, as scholars conduct research, write papers, tour seminars, apply to workshops and conferences, submit to journals, apply for grants and fellowships, and generally fight their way towards tenure. Tenure, to be noted, is a stage of this tournament, but it’s not the end (the end happens at funerals and Nobel Prize ceremonies.)

“You aren’t tenured by your department. You’re tenured by the profession.” – academic proverb

The tournament is subtle and unrelenting. For those who seek to climb the ladder or remain on top, the strategies are more varied than you might expect. It is, point of fact, not all about research productivity, scholarly contributions, and intellectual advancements. It’s also about public goods, including data curation, lab management, feedback on other people’s research, journal editing, idea sharing, even referee reports. From the most cyncical careerist point of view, however, it remains a status game, which means what matters at the end of the day is not how good you are, but how good other people think you are. Or how good people think other people think you are. Or how good…you get the k-level reasoning idea.

Can you see where the trouble seeps into this tweedy swamp of ambition and ego? The inherent subjectivity of it. The biases some of us have, the biases all of us have. The dark arts of manipulating image, conversation, and public opinion. The herding around ideas. The bureaucratic and scholarly gamesmanship that can hold back one paper and elevate another. Every story your paranoid lizard brain can dream up explaining why a node in the tournament decision tree turned against you and in another’s favor.

Which brings me back to EJMR.

I’ll make a statement you don’t have to believe: I expected the worst behavior to be at the good schools. Why? Because they are embroiled in the most ruthless, unforgiving level of the tournament, and most of them are losing. That’s not a hypothesis, that’s just a mathematical reality. For every 25 students in a top PhD program, I’d guess 10-12 end up in academia. Of those, 6-10 are at an R1. Of those, 1-2 are in a top school. Of those, maybe 1 gets tenure at said top school.

From the perspective of the most competitive souls, that’s 96% who are losers. Not in the absolute sense, but in the “at some stage of the game someone else was chosen over them” sense. In the relative, zero-sum, status seeking sense. That doesn’t mean 96% of academics are angry, but it does make for a large pool of potentially angry people. People who, in a moment of weakness, might feed that dark tapeworm of the soul whose only sustenance is the denigration and suffering of people they envy. That desperate willingness to believe the only reason you didn’t “win” is because your competitors were vile and dishonorable? That’s a tapeworm buffet.

The dark tapeworm is an emotional parasite, isolated and lonely in it’s host. EJMR, in its toxic final form, allowed thousands of depressed, angry tapeworms to find community and feed each other. To affirm the belief festering within each of them that they were cheated. That they would have gotten the job, published, admitted, invited, tenure. That they would have won just one more round, and risen just one more level, if it wasn’t for them. The cheaters.

It’s not surprising that the targets of EJMR hate were disproportionately (but not exclusively) women and people of color. I’m not going to tour you through the misogny and racism on EJMR, but I will note that it’s a good reminder that intelligence isn’t the prophylactic against grotesque beliefs and behavior that you might hope it is. Quite the contrary, it’s almost (almost) heartwarming to see that status envy and anger turn everyone into the same monsters, looking to attack and blame the same people, whether you’re an unemployed trucker in Arkansas worried about making rent or a 5th year PhD student at Harvard nervously managing the shame of having to settle for an industry job that starts at $190k a year.

Returing to the thesis of this post, let’s not forget that tournaments are perfectly fine. They can even be positive sum games. A golf tournament only has one winner, but the more honorable the competitors are, the more they collectively raise the status and opportunities of others in their tournament, the higher the quality of their collective product, which means a bigger prize pool for everyone. There’s a reason the prize money isn’t winner-take-all: they know that a certain amount of cooperation amongst competitors is necessary for the tournament as a whole to thrive.

And that’s why this paper is important. Beyond shining a light on grotesque and dangerous behavior, it’s a wake-up call that the status tournament in academic economics is out of control and veering into negative sum territory. EJMR got a foothold because students and faculty had questions nobody felt they could ask or answer without anonymity. A secret curriculum. A gnawing, desperate fear that you don’t understand the rules. How do I get in the NBER? Can I use the same data as another student? Can I renege on a job if a better one is offered? Does journal X count for tenure? EJMR thrived and achieved critical mass. But that critical mass, combined with anonymity and the abandoning of content moderation, became a breeding ground for emotional tapeworms and here we are.

So how do we kill it off? Well, we can go after the most aggressive and disgusting posters on the website, but that feels a bit like attacking a forest fire with a fire extinguisher. In the long run, I suspect the solutions will be public goods. Not unlike undermining the labor supply of a terrorist group by supplying clean water and healthcare, I think the profession needs to start providing the public goods that were the original EJMR lifespring. Journal submission records. Hiring decision transparency (i.e. when a job is filled or still considering candidates). Invitation, acceptance, and rejection statuses in real time. Repositories of course notes and slides. A hidden curriculum made visible.

And, yes, an anonymous message board (or a identified board with a special anonymous section), but with strict content moderation. We know it can be done. You don’t see any of the same filth on statalist or the economics subreddit. We have professional associations, including the AEA, whose sole purpose is to provide public goods. I’m not going to dissuade anyone, particularly those attacked, from going after EJMR operators or posters through legal channels. But it we want to rip it out of the earth, root and vine, I see no better way than to beat it in the marketplace. And in doing so, we might even smooth over the rough edges of the status tournament we’re trying to build lives and careers in.

Because maybe the collective production of new knowledge at the bleeding edge of economics could even be a positive sum game?