Apologies if this is already covered in the citations you linked somewhere, but I don’t think the chart/graph you posted is direct evidence that economics is more insular than other fields. There are more economists (and psychologists!) than anthropologists and political scientists[1], so if you assume citations are a random graph[2] with a penalty across disciplines that decreases with time, you might get something similar to the current observed data, without any meaningful differences in field in propensity to cite .
Now I haven’t done the analysis myself so maybe you still see bias after controlling for that, but I think this is such an obvious thing you should control for that I’m skeptical of any analysis without such controls.
I also think “minorities are given fewer degrees in economics than other disciplines” is a weird gloss for the Bayer and Rouse data, since their definition of “minority” inexplicably do not include Asians!
For example, a quick Google search suggests ~6200 political scientists and ~35,000 economists in the US, which is a very similar to eyeballing the ratios you posted.
In the extreme, imagine if there’s 10,000 economists and 10 philologists. Obviously the philologists are individually much more likely to cite economists than vice versa! So that alone can drive the ratio differences, even if the philologists actually have lower cross-disciplinary willingness to cite than the economists!
The first (by Fourcade et al) is about percentage not absolute numbers, so this is direct evidence of economists preferring to stay insular. Same for the one about citations in flagship journals. We can see that both the number of papers and the number of citations in economics is indeed higher, however it’s so minor (still within the same order of magnitude), while the differences are so large (more than an order of magnitude) that the trend still remains. Similar for the Angris et al one (also, I don’t know where you got these numbers from… the bureau of labor statistics indeed says 6,200 political scientists, but only 17,500 economists, so that ratio is not enough to explain the gap).
I’m more worried about black and other minorities within EA, since, again looking at the EA demographics data, Asians do comparatively better (comparatively being a load-bearing term there), while black and brown people do not (maybe also inherited from economics?). When we look at the race scandals in EA (Bostrom scandal, Manifest scandal, FLI scandal...) it’s always about black and brown people being called less-intelligent, not Asians. So I think that’s where our focus should be.
The source was DataUSA; I didn’t look too carefully and I’m happy to agree that BLS is a better source.
The first (by Fourcade et al) is about percentage not absolute numbers, so this is direct evidence of economists preferring to stay insular
Suppose there are 1000 economists in the world and only 2 political scientists. Would you agree that if a higher percentage of political scientists’ citations were of economists than economists citing political scientists, it’s not evidence of economists being more insular?
If it was literally 2 we couldn’t do statistics, but say it was the same ratio but one we could do statistics on, e.g. 1000.000 vs 2000, I would say this research is valid. If it was just about citations it would be a problem, but what’s being polled there is opinions on interdisciplinary research, so it’s about attitude towards working with other disciplines in general.
If a higher percentage of (a quantitatively smaller number of) political scientists think working with other disciplines is better, whereas a lower percentage of (a quantitatively higher number of) economists think so, then even though there is (in absolute numbers) a higher quantity of economists who think that interdisciplinary research is better, we can still (comparatively) say that economists are more in favor of being insular than political scientists.
I ended up doing some of my own empirics here. See my comment below in response to David.
I am beginning to see what Linch is saying. The actual hard question here is—What is the appropriate counterfactual to EA? EA is more insular compared to what exactly? Bob says compare the state of Econ against the state of EA but is that fair? I wrote some more initial thoughts down in my Github repo along with some R/Python code.
I can’t believe my first instinct was to think about the comparison group. But I got there and better late than never!
Haha thanks! Honestly I think you contributed much more to the discussion than I did! No need to say “I am beginning to see what Linch is saying.” I think you were answering a different question!
Apologies if this is already covered in the citations you linked somewhere, but I don’t think the chart/graph you posted is direct evidence that economics is more insular than other fields. There are more economists (and psychologists!) than anthropologists and political scientists[1], so if you assume citations are a random graph[2] with a penalty across disciplines that decreases with time, you might get something similar to the current observed data, without any meaningful differences in field in propensity to cite .
Now I haven’t done the analysis myself so maybe you still see bias after controlling for that, but I think this is such an obvious thing you should control for that I’m skeptical of any analysis without such controls.
I also think “minorities are given fewer degrees in economics than other disciplines” is a weird gloss for the Bayer and Rouse data, since their definition of “minority” inexplicably do not include Asians!
For example, a quick Google search suggests ~6200 political scientists and ~35,000 economists in the US, which is a very similar to eyeballing the ratios you posted.
In the extreme, imagine if there’s 10,000 economists and 10 philologists. Obviously the philologists are individually much more likely to cite economists than vice versa! So that alone can drive the ratio differences, even if the philologists actually have lower cross-disciplinary willingness to cite than the economists!
The first (by Fourcade et al) is about percentage not absolute numbers, so this is direct evidence of economists preferring to stay insular. Same for the one about citations in flagship journals. We can see that both the number of papers and the number of citations in economics is indeed higher, however it’s so minor (still within the same order of magnitude), while the differences are so large (more than an order of magnitude) that the trend still remains. Similar for the Angris et al one (also, I don’t know where you got these numbers from… the bureau of labor statistics indeed says 6,200 political scientists, but only 17,500 economists, so that ratio is not enough to explain the gap).
I’m more worried about black and other minorities within EA, since, again looking at the EA demographics data, Asians do comparatively better (comparatively being a load-bearing term there), while black and brown people do not (maybe also inherited from economics?). When we look at the race scandals in EA (Bostrom scandal, Manifest scandal, FLI scandal...) it’s always about black and brown people being called less-intelligent, not Asians. So I think that’s where our focus should be.
The source was DataUSA; I didn’t look too carefully and I’m happy to agree that BLS is a better source.
Suppose there are 1000 economists in the world and only 2 political scientists. Would you agree that if a higher percentage of political scientists’ citations were of economists than economists citing political scientists, it’s not evidence of economists being more insular?
If it was literally 2 we couldn’t do statistics, but say it was the same ratio but one we could do statistics on, e.g. 1000.000 vs 2000, I would say this research is valid. If it was just about citations it would be a problem, but what’s being polled there is opinions on interdisciplinary research, so it’s about attitude towards working with other disciplines in general.
If a higher percentage of (a quantitatively smaller number of) political scientists think working with other disciplines is better, whereas a lower percentage of (a quantitatively higher number of) economists think so, then even though there is (in absolute numbers) a higher quantity of economists who think that interdisciplinary research is better, we can still (comparatively) say that economists are more in favor of being insular than political scientists.
I agree about attitudes, I was referring to citations.
I ended up doing some of my own empirics here. See my comment below in response to David.
I am beginning to see what Linch is saying. The actual hard question here is—What is the appropriate counterfactual to EA? EA is more insular compared to what exactly? Bob says compare the state of Econ against the state of EA but is that fair? I wrote some more initial thoughts down in my Github repo along with some R/Python code.
I can’t believe my first instinct was to think about the comparison group. But I got there and better late than never!
Haha thanks! Honestly I think you contributed much more to the discussion than I did! No need to say “I am beginning to see what Linch is saying.” I think you were answering a different question!