We have here two papers that are critical of the culture of academic economics. Where can they be published?

The first paper is by Haynes Goddard. It’s called Promoting Intellectual Honesty in Higher Education: Addressing Cognitive Biases, Political Discourse, and Court Decisions, and it follows up on a discussion we had in this space in 2021. Back then, lots of people were stuck at home with nothing better to do than read blogs, so that little post got 96 comments.

Goddard sent me this paper and asked if I had any idea where it could be published.

My take on this article is that it would be perfect for a hypothetical journal of economics or social science criticism. There’s an existing journal, Econ Journal Watch, and I’m on its editorial board, but Goddard’s article wouldn’t quite fit there, partly because its political orientation doesn’t match that of the journal and partly because Econ Journal Watch focuses on critiques of particular papers in the field rather than critiques of the larger ideology.

And this made me think of another paper that would fit well in the hypothetical journal, Economics Criticism. It’s a paper I recently wrote, When fiction is presented as real: The case of the burly boatmen, which begins:

From Adam Smith’s pin factory and Rousseau’s state of nature onward, parables—openly fictional or speculative stories constructed to dramatize a theoretical point—have been central to economics and other social sciences. Sometimes, though, a parable can escape its cage and be presented as a real event that happened in the wild, in which case what was originally intended as an explanation can be presented as empirical evidence.

Attributing fiction as fact is dangerous for two reasons. First, we can fool ourselves and others into thinking the evidence for a proposition is stronger than it actually is. Second, stories are not elaborated at random; when they are altered in the retelling it is natural for authors to modify their details in ways that fit the theories they want to prove. This is fine when a parable is presented as such; the problem arises when the story’s original foundation and later trajectory are obscured, leading authors and readers to think of it as empirical confirmation.

This is a story of how a particular story spread and mutate across the economics literature over several decades, becoming more fictional at each step while being presented more and more as factual. It should be a warning to authors and readers of research papers to beware of stories that fit a theory all too well and to check through the trail of references before retelling–or, worse, elaborating upon–stories that are presented as real.

The two papers are related in some way.

I don’t agree with everything in Goddard’s paper, and I don’t expect all of you to agree with everything in mine. That’s ok–the point is not to enforce universal agreement, indeed, a key point of both papers is to warn against ideological conformity.

Unfortunately the journal Economics Criticism does not exist. If any of you have suggestions of where Goddard and I can publish our papers, please let me know. Extra points if it’s a journal where I’ve not yet published.