Top EWED Blogs of 2023

It’s the 3-year anniversary of EWED. Thanks for reading and sharing. Our blog has been cited by The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Reason Magazine, Marginal Revolution, and many others.

The following posts are in order, starting with the entry that got the most page views so far in 2023.

“Why Tenure” Mike Makowsky on academic tenure and the unintended consequences of taking it away.

“Steal My Paper Ideas!” James offered the internet research ideas that he does not have time to pursue.

“ChatGPT Cites Economics Papers That Do Not Exist” I wrote about a problem with ChatGPT hallucinations. This idea has now been more formally explored in my working paper available on SSRN (which has been trending in top-10 download lists on SSRN throughout the summer). The point is not just that GPT will create fake citations. The important take-away is that GPT can fabricate falsehoods of all kinds that sound serious. Citations are easy to count and verify. Once we have a quantitative measure, we can also demonstrate that accuracy declines when a topic is less general.

“On EJMR, status competitions, and tapeworms” Mike on ill will in the profession.

“On the paucity of new ideas and the paradox of choice in modern research” It’s Mike. He is a whole pattern in the data this year. (Maybe we can get new ideas from James!)

“Bank for International Settlements: $70 Trillion Dollars Is Missing from Official Global Financial Accounting” A December, 2022 report from the Bank for International Settlements stated that $70 trillion was missing missing from normally reported global financial statistics. That is nearly three times the size of the U.S. GDP. Scott’s January post delineated what was going on and why this might turn into a problem.

“The Value of Student Organizations and On-Campus Education: Anecdotal Evidence from Tim Keller” Me on what happens at The University besides delivering information in lectures.

“Is College Enrollment Falling?” Jeremy on a big question for academics. Here’s a recent tweet from him on demographics.

“Spending on Housing: It Hasn’t Really Increased in the Past 40 Years” Jeremy. Incidentally, some of his posts from last year are still so popular that they have more traffic than the top 2023 posts. That includes: Who is the Wealthiest Generation? and The Wealth of Generations: Latest Update

If you ever want to know what people were saying about my generation when we were fresh out of college, watch an SNL sketch called “The Millennials”. Now we are just the parents at the parent-teacher conferences. Our jams play at the grocery store at 8am (Wonderwall, anyone?). And Jeremy is documenting the state of our finances.

“Mortgage Fraud Is Surprisingly Common Among Real Estate Investors” from James. Who knew?

“House Rich – House Poor” Zachary created create an affordability index. And also note that he provides tips for getting better teaching evaluations in “5 Easy Steps to Improve Your Course Evals”

Lastly, congrats to our friends and mentors at Marginal Revolution who are celebrating 20 years of blogging.