A new beginning...
...hopefully not the end
I think this was one of the worst weeks of my life thus far. So shitty in fact, that I decided to start blogging while sitting in a café in Cambridge while waiting for a friend from London to arrive.
My personal emotional rollercoaster aside(at the moment seemingly nosediving into the depths of hell), it has been a shitty week in British politics, with the far less charismatic centrist version of Ioseb Jughashvili, Keir Starmer, announcing that the Labour Party will not nominate Jeremy Corbyn as their candidate from Islington North in the next General Election. It’s not unexpected, given Beer Korma’s purge against the Labour Left at large, and war on Corbyn, but you really have to wonder where the British Left goes from here. The weaponisation of antisemitism allegations against the Labour Left isn’t just aimed at someone like Corbyn, Fear Karma forced Kim Johnson (MP, Liverpool Riverside) to apologise for calling Israel a fascist, apartheid state- which for the record, it is. It’s a curious thing of course, that Tear Farmer keeps purging Jewish members from the Labour Party, especially from the Jewish Voice of Labour group, but can still fashion itself as being tough on anti-semitism, because that’s kind of what you end up with when your barometer for antisemitism is dictated primarily by whether someone supports Palestine or not. Then of course, you have Nicola Sturgeon stepping down as First Minister of Scotland, with who will succeed her being a matter of great speculation and some concern for Scottish Nationalists. All of this drama, while we are currently in the midst of a major economic crisis where the Tories have rock bottom approval ratings.
This tweet by Pengpeng Xiao at Duke, provoked some discussion over the increasingly insane qualifications arms race to do a PhD in Economics in North America where now perfect grades, taking grad school maths courses(that most economists will never use) and top recommendations are no longer sufficient, but prior research experience in the form of ‘predocs’ are also becoming an increasing filtering criteria.
Some will dismiss this as simple supply and demand, but there’s a much larger structural issue in the discipline that goes unacknowledged. A few departments in the US at present control both journals and have an outsize influence on the job market. You land up in one of those departments or exist within their networks, and even absolute horseshit will get published and you have your pick of jobs (my favourite example of this is how an MIT job market paper from a few years back was something really ridiculous about caste and cricket, and it landed the author a job at UBC in Canada and was published in AER), whereas the US job market is increasingly closed off to job seekers from even Europe let alone Asia, LatAm and Africa.
Compounding the issue is the fact that economics journals have incredibly long processing times between submission of a draft to publication with multiple top journals stipulating that you cannot submit to other journals while your paper is being processed. When your entire profession depends on access to certain institutions and networks, you will obviously see this kind of thing happening. It’s a thing in all disciplines, but particularly pernicious in economics. Some fields of economics are better than others, but this is generally true.