Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest

Jeff points me to this and this. There seems to be a perception that “economists, the people who will coolly explain why people will be completely corrupt if the marginal benefit exceeds the marginal cost, see themselves as being completely not corrupt” (according to Atrios) and that “the economists who have decided to lend their names to the [Romney] campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud” (according to Krugman).

The bloggers above are talking about macro, and perhaps they’re right that macroeconomists see themselves as uncorruptible and above it all. As with political science, the key parts of macroeconomics are about what is good for the world (or, at least, what is good for the country), and it’s hard to do this well from a level of complete cynicism. I’m no expert on macroeconomics, but my general impression is that, Marxists aside, macroeconomists tend to assume shared goals.

Micro, though, that’s completely different. These dudes are happy to admit to their own biases, and they’re acutely aware that systems can be gamed by people who might be just like them in technique but with different goals. For example, Steven Levitt wrote:

My view is that the emails [extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia] aren’t that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals? When I told my father that I was sending my work saying car seats are not that effective to medical journals, he laughed and said they would never publish it because of the result, no matter how well done the analysis was. (As is so often the case, he was right, and I eventually published it in an economics journal.)

Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other. I’ve seen economists do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures. When economists get mixed up in public policy, things get messier. So it is not at all surprising to me that climate scientists would behave the same way.

And Levitt himself has been involved in some controversies about unethical scholarly behavior in econ journals.

As I wrote when I first read Levitt’s remarks, I’m not quite sure how to interpret the overall flow of his reasoning. On one hand, I can’t disagree with the descriptive implications: Some scientists behave badly. I don’t know enough about economics to verify his claim that academics in that field “constantly trying to undermine each other . . . do far worse things than pulling tricks in figures”–but I’ll take Levitt’s word for it.

But I’m disturbed by the possible normative implications of Levitt’s statement. It’s certainly not the case that everybody does it! I’m a scientist, and, no, I don’t “pull tricks in figures” or anything like this. I don’t know what percentage of scientists we’re talking about here, but I don’t think this is what the best scientists do. And I certainly don’t think it’s ok to do so.

What I’m saying is, I think Levitt is doing a big service by publicly recognizing that scientists sometimes—often?—do unethical behavior such as hiding data. But I’m unhappy with the sense of amused, world-weary tolerance that I get from reading his comment.

Macro/micro

To return to my original point: Atrios and Krugman are disturbed by macro guys who don’t acknowledge their direct conflicts of interest. Coming from the other direction, though, are microeconomists who are, to my taste, too accepting of the inevitability of scholars gaming the system.

I would prefer an intermediate position in which we recognize the temptations of conflict of interest and work to reduce the resulting biases, without losing the ethical standard under which we are expected to be as open and honest as possible. Realism without cynicism (to the extent possible).

5 thoughts on “Macro, micro, and conflicts of interest

  1. Within the field of economics, academics work behind the scenes constantly trying to undermine each other.

    The main problem is that there is no real consequence to being wrong in academy. If you have tenure, it’s hard to touch you, and if you don’t, you find someone with tenure and suck up to them, whether they are wrong or right. It’s nice to be right but it’s harder and even better than being right is having a tenured “position”, and the best way to get that is to agree with a person who has one, right or wrong.

    As a personal example, I was once in a top twenty economics department and when I arrived the faculty all groused about the chairman’s “erroneous facts”. It seems the chairman had discovered the easiest way to win an argument was simply to assert a falsehood as truth. He was, after all, the chairman, so no one could really oppose him. I would like to say that these faculty, being exposed to this, then devoted there life to honest argumentation. I would like to say that, but can’t, as they learned their own methods of using erroneous facts.

  2. ‘My view is that the emails [extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia] aren’t that damaging. Is it surprising that scientists would try to keep work that disagrees with their findings out of journals?’

    Levitt was writing about a topic he obviously knew little about, hence negative credibility, and the writing technique on the one side it seems fair, but leaves a false negative impression.

    The problem wasn’t disagreement, it was that the paper (Soon&Baliunas) was so bad that the incoming Editor-in-Chief (Hans von Storch) and several other editors resigned, because:

    a) The publisher wouldn’t let them retract it.
    b) They’d been getting worried about other bad papers being let through by one editor.
    c) And they didn’t want their names associated with junk.

    In fact, the scientists worried this *underestimated* the extent of the problem.

    See this or a slightly different treatment, both based on the same detailed analysis.

  3. That is what struck us the most in the survey responses we got from researchers about financial conflicts of interest – http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199801083380206

    Researchers who very well understood why patients are blinded in clinical research studies, seemed to believe, that unlike patients, it was just fine for them to know what result the sponsor desired…

    By the way, given today’s standards it’s unlikely that a similar survey would get REB approval unless there was a means to ensure full anonymity of individuals that even a judge could not undo.

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