Getting an academic field to change its ways is hard. But it does happen. And I think changes in the field of economics are a good illustration of some of the dynamics that make that possible.
This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article How a field fixes itself: the applied turn in economics, published on New Things Under the Sun.
Articles mentioned:
Leamer, Edward E. 1983. Let’s Take the Con Out of Econometrics. American Economic Review 73(1): 31-43. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1803924
Hamermesh, Daniel S. 2013. Six Decades of Top Economics Publishing: Who and How? Journal of Economic Literature 51(1): 162-72. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.51.1.162
Backhouse, Roger E., and Béatrice Cherrier. 2017. The age of the applied economist: the transformation of economics since the 1970s. History of Political Economy 49 (annual supplement): 1-33. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-4166239
Angrist, Joshua D., and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. 2010. The credibility revolution in empirical economics: how better research design is taking the con out of econometrics. Journal of Economic Perspectives 24(2): 3-30. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.24.2.3
Angrist, Josh, Pierre Azoulay, Glenn Ellison, Ryan Hill, and Susan Feng Lu. 2020. Inside job or deep impact? Extramural citations and the influence of economic scholarship. Journal of Economic Literature 58(1): 3-52. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20181508
Bédécarrats, Florent, Isabelle Guérin, and François Roubaud. 2020. Randomized control trials in the field of development. Oxford University Press.
Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. 2017. The enigma of reason. Harvard University Press.
Akerlof, George A., and Pascal Michaillat. 2018. Persistence of false paradigms in low-power sciences. PNAS 115(52): 13228-13233. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816454115
Kuhn, Thomas. 1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Smaldino, Paul E., and Cailin O’Connor. 2021. Interdisciplinarity can aid the spread of better methods between scientific communities. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.31222/osf.io/cm5v3
Heckman, James J., and Sidharth Moktan. 2020. Publishing and promotion in economics: the tyranny of the top five. Journal of Economic Literature 58(2): 419-70. https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20191574
Maher, Thomas V., Charles Seguin, Yongjun Zhang, and Andrew P. Davis. 2020. Social scientists’ testimony before Congress in the United States between 1946-2016, trends from a new dataset. PLOS ONE 15(3): e0230104. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230104
Panhas, Matthew, and John D. Singleton. 2017. The empirical economist’s toolkit: from models to methods. History of Political Economy 49(annual supplement): 127-157. https://doi.org/10.1215/00182702-4166299
de Souza Leão, Luciana, and Gil Eyal. 2019. The rise of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in international development in historical perspective. Theory and Society 48: 383-418. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09352-6