Economists Behaving Badly
Comments on a paper by Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jensen on Toxicity Among Economists
Last month, three economists (Florian Ederer, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Kyle Jensen) presented a paper called “Anonymity and Identity Online” at the annual conference of the National Bureau for Economic Research (watch it here). The paper is actually pretty simple, if depressing. The were able to extract the IP addresses from the “Econ Job Market Rumors” website and then show which cities and universities were responsible for generating the content on EJMR. This is important because EJMR has a community of posters who write a great deal of highly racist and sexist content, as well as material that maligns established economists and those seeking jobs. Thus, this paper documents where the dreck comes from.
Comment #1: This paper is important as a descriptive exercise because it establishes that there is a notable level of toxic material, and it is generated from locations associated with highly prestigious programs. How much? It’s a tricky issue, but it seems that about10-15% of comments are contained in toxic threads. The threads emerge from computers found in major departments of economics, as well as some of its major institutions, like Federal Reserve and the NBER conference itself. Thus, you can’t write toxicity off as the product of a few marginal people.
Comment #2: Size matters. It is false to describe EJMR as an academic 4chan. Any honest reader (including myself when I read it years ago) has to admit that most posts are about fairly normal academic topics such as economic theory, applied statistics, and useful job market information. Still, it is also true that EJMR has a subculture that is quite toxic. Though it is by no means a majority, it exists, and it is big enough to make any rational person concerned. For example, let’s say that only (!) 15% of economists are toxic and hostile. Then that means that in a department of 20 professors, 3 will be outright hostile toward women and minorities. That’s enough to create plenty of problems. In a 2-2 teaching program, 12 courses per year, which may include required courses. These folks also serve on committees for graduate students and hiring committees. Those three people can easily make life miserable.
Comment #3: Catherine Tucker’s verbal response to the paper is anemic, if not cowardly. Most of her comments address the paper’s contribution to digital economics. Until the end of the comments, she doesn’t seem to want to address the real purpose of the paper - to document a serious problem and encourage the institutions of the economics profession to respond. I am not alone on this point. One of the first comments tells her not to treat this paper like another case of “Freakonomics” where you can turn any topic into a clever economics paper.
We can also take a moment to praise the authors to providing an extra tool for documenting toxic subcultures. The same tools can be used to study the toxicity of similar websites in sociology, political science and other fields. I would like to see how the portrayal of toxicity varies across fields. Is econ better or worse? How bad is it? I can also imagine analyses that look at department level variables (rank or size) to predict toxicity.
I thank the authors for doing this work. It’s an important step in the right direction.
Bottom line: If you let an animal die in your yard and don’t clean it up, it’ll stink up the place.
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