We are in front of a new job-market season, when all old Ph.D. students look for jobs. They will send out their packages, which are bound to be heavy, because there is some belief that long papers are better than short papers. They did not invent this technique, writing long papers. Look at Econometrica or JET, and you will find many papers with an extremely long introduction, that could be summarized in half the space. A paper of 50 pages is the standard. How many bright ideas require 50 pages?
When I was in high school, I had to do a chore on “Crime and Punishment”. To those lucky ones who didn’t have to read it, I will reveal that it is more than 1000 pages long. I simply couldn’t do it. I had a 400-page shorter version. I couldn’t read it either. Eventually I settled for a 50-page summary. And I got the second highest grade in class. So either the other students didn’t even read the 50-page summary, or the 50-page summary is enough to get the essence of “Crime and Punishment”. I am confident that this is not unique to Russian writers, and most 50-page papers can be summarized in 10 pages.
So why do Economists write 50-page papers? Why did we drift to this equilibrium that make us give up reading papers, because they are too long?
9 comments
August 20, 2010 at 2:13 am
A. Konovalov
Excuse me, but “Crime and Punishment” is no more than 600 pages long – both in Russian and English. Don’t you confuse it with Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”?
August 20, 2010 at 3:25 am
John
Crime and Punishment isn’t as long as you’re saying…it’s about half that.
August 20, 2010 at 4:57 am
Eilon
You are both absolutely right. Apparently the trauma caused to this particular innocent soul from being ought to read “Crime and Punishment” was sufficient to distort his perception of the length of the book.
After 20 years we are less innocent, but do we like to read needlessly long 50-page papers?
August 20, 2010 at 5:56 am
Nils Ove
I think the reason why economists write long articles are that it is more important to publish articles, then that people actually read them. And when the costs of writing short and concise is higher than writing a long paper, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that economists then choose to write long papers instead of short ones.
August 20, 2010 at 7:36 am
Greg Finley
It’s very expensive to determine the quality of an academic paper, both in the time required to read it and the expertise necessary to judge it. Because of this, length serves as a very imprecise proxy for quality, but that’s the best we can do.
What’s the alternative? Could journal referees give each paper a score, instead of just a binary accept or reject?
August 20, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Dan in Euroland
Well just thank the heavens you are not a law professor. The papers are at least double the length, and filled with verbiage to hide the logical inconsistencies.
August 20, 2010 at 9:03 pm
Jonathan Weinstein
Glenn Ellison has a paper about lengthening economics papers:
“Evolving Standards for Academic Publishing: A q-r Theory”
Journal of Political Economy, 105(5), 947-1034, 2002
Part of what drives the model is that quality of the main ideas can be observed accurately only by specialists, while any reader can observe thoroughness of scholarship. For other possible explanations, see both this and Glenn’s related paper, on the slowdown of economic publishing.
I liked Crime and Punishment, but then, it wasn’t assigned to me, so that helps.
August 21, 2010 at 1:20 am
Bob Lucas
Why isn’t anyone stating the obvious? The reason is that the longer the paper, the less likely the reason to read it. What percentage of professional economic scholars care about being published to maintain their employment (think of all the institutions that only require one paper published per year). If anything, this only signals productivity in producing pages though not necessarily content. Funny how inefficient this all is.
October 6, 2010 at 9:48 pm
But Nash
Aren’t we all impressed how SHORT John Nash’s thesis was?