I confess. Blogging is harder than publishing. Lance Fortnow tells me that I would find Blogging easier if the orifice in my antipodes was not constricted. Perhaps this is true, but it does make one wonder about the source of a bloggers wisdom.
Very well then. I will follow his advice. Where is the milk of magnesia? Jacta alea est.
Drive-by theorizing. Practiced by applied theorists. This is the species that theorizes about phenomena, rather than theory.
Works like this. Read a book from another discipline about some unusual phenomena over the summer. In the fall, write a paper with an economic model about the phenomena. Usually with a title like `An Economic Theory of BLANK.’ A popular choice for BLANK is one of the 7 deadly sins (but these have been exhausted) or something magesterial like empire, justice, language, family or sex.
The contents of said paper consist of a verbal intuition formalized with a patina of mathematics. Indeed, the best examples, admit no other intuition but the one advanced by the author. Of course, this makes the mathematical exercise utterly pointless. We build mathematical models to sort out competing intuitions not to codify them.
When completed, move on. It is always best to have the first word, no matter how anemic, than the last.
Of course, one should name names. I won’t. I’ve sipped a laxative not drowned in it.
6 comments
September 29, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Frank
Ouch
October 2, 2009 at 1:51 pm
charles
I would rather put it like this: “Drive-by theorizing. Practiced by SOME applied theorists”. Or do you include all the theoretical industrial organization literature (an instance or applied theory) in your description?
October 3, 2009 at 11:33 am
rvohra
Yes, I should have qualified it with the word `SOME.’ Should one include IO theorists? They focus on more modest goals- the behavior of firms and exhibit a sustained interest in the subject. But, yes, one can find examples of IO models encoding a single intuition rather than sorting between competing ones.
October 6, 2009 at 9:05 am
milgromweber
Akerlof’s market for lemons is not about a topic outside economics but other than that the rest seems to fit your story. It does not contain competing intuitions in any serious sense. There is one intuition, based on the winner’s curse. There is a lot of verbal intuition and the math is not hard and could be described as a patina. By the Vohra definition, it fits bad applied theory.
So, I guess we either have to say Vohra’s definition is wrong or Akerlof’s paper is bad. If the former, I guess we have to conclude that Vohra himself is engaging in something close to his definition of applied theory: he is going outside his field (applied math) to offer a verbal intuition for a topic (economic theory) with no competing intuition.
October 6, 2009 at 10:26 am
rvohra
`Ouch’, to quote an earlier commentator. I guess I have to take my lumps.
Actually, I think the Lemons paper has a competing intuition……that markets clear. So, it does not fail the test I proposed. But I agree, that the mathematics was unnecessary……an example would have sufficed to make the point.
As to first line of the second paragraph……a false dichotomy. The lemons paper is insubstantial AND I am an idiot is also possibility. I’ll grant the second, and it seems milgromweber has given a pretty good argument for the first.
Am I guilty of drive-by-theorizing? First, it is unclear what my field is. If it is the union card one receives upon graduation that determines it, that would make Debreu, Wilson, Kreps, Roth & Stachetti persona no grata in economics. Second, one would have to argue that I am indeed driving by.
October 6, 2009 at 1:23 pm
milgromweber
1. If “markets clear” is a competing intuition, I guess every paper has a competing intuition, namely the negation of the main hypothesis of the paper. Then, the competing intuition property is vacuous.
2. I take it as self-evident that Akerlof’s paper is substantial – I barely described it, hence I do not see how I made a claim that it is insubstantial.
3. My claim is not that non-economists cannot transition to economics but a specific point about the content of your blog post.