Move over, Sokal Hoax

Something has gone wrong in the university—especially in certain fields within the social sciences. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon #slatepitching the libs has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, I have spent a good 45 minutes inside the scholarship I see as an intrinsic part of this problem.

I have spent that time writing an academic paper and publishing it in a respected peer-reviewed journal associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “economics” or “political economy” (for example, law and economics) or “neo-classical theory” because it is rooted in that postmodern brand of “theory” which arose in the early eighties. I undertook this project to study, understand, and expose the reality of political economy, which is corrupting academic research. Because open, good-faith conversation around topics such as labor, power and exploitation (and the scholarship that works with them) is nearly impossible, my aim has been to reboot these conversations. I hope this will give people—especially those who believe in liberalism, progress, modernity, open inquiry, and social justice—a clear reason to look at the libertarian madness coming out of the academic and activist right and say, “No, I will not go along with that. You do not speak for me.”

I came to conceptualize this project as a kind of exercise in which I sought to uncover the hidden incentive structures of the discipline, and subject them to rigorous game theoretic analysis, obtaining validation of how absurd theses could be made acceptable to reviewers, in a manner that would be highly revealing about the state of the field. I hypothesized that economics journals had a strong revealed preference for revealed preferences arguments, in which apparent exploitation was revealed to be free exchange, leading to Pareto superior outcomes, and that statistical techniques – even if misapplied – provided a weak signal of quality. Thus led me to the conclusion that there existed a pooling equilibrium, in which self-evidently ridiculous academic claims could mingle indistinguishably with serious ones, as long as they had the right ideological and methodological smell. Papers that were outlandish or intentionally broken in significant ways could blend in almost perfectly with others in the discipline under my consideration.

My paper-writing methodology followed a specific pattern: it started with an idea that spoke to my epistemological or ethical concerns with the field and then sought to bend the existing scholarship to support it. The goal was always to use what the existing literature offered to get some little bit of lunacy or depravity to be acceptable at the highest levels of intellectual respectability within the field.

So I just thought a nutty and inhumane idea up and ran with it. What if workplace sexual harassment wasn’t an abuse of power, but a kind of equitable market exchange? Rather than being a brutish “instrument of power and intimidation,” sexual harassment might be viewed as “an undesirable working condition that may generate a compensating pay differential.” Just as risk-accepting people are prepared to do dangerous jobs so long as they get paid more for it, so might people who didn’t really mind getting felt up by their boss or co-workers all that much accept a higher risk of harassment in exchange for more money in their weekly pay check. I found some very broad statistics, for industrial categories like ‘agriculture,’ ‘information’ and ‘Professional and business services,’ regressed them against sexual harassment charges filed with the EEOC, and bingo! I found a statistically significant positive relationship between pay and the number of reported incidents of sexual harassment. The Friedmanite magic of markets at work again, transforming an apparent pattern of sexual predation into a win-win-relationship where everyone ends up better off!

Now, people in other disciplines might have been suspicious of these findings. They might have raised any one of a number of difficult questions, asking for example, whether the reported incidence of sexual harassment might itself be a product of power relationships, so that people in badly paid jobs are less likely to report harassment and generate the indicators I was using. But proper political economists know that labour monopsony doesn’t exist! Problem solved.

My methodology is central to contextualizing my claims. I could have just submitted pieces to lots of journals, in the hope that a few would stick, and then selectively misrepresented intellectual charity as evidence of wholesale intellectual corruption. But then, I’d have taken the risk that many of my submissions would be rejected, and that people might have suggested on Twitter that I was full of shit. This is why I sought to learn about this culture and establish that I had become fluent in its language and customs by publishing peer-reviewed papers in its top journal, which usually only experts in the field are capable of doing.

Accordingly, I decided to try to get the article into the American Economic Review, universally recognized as the top journal in the discipline. This seemed daunting, but when I read an article about the experience of another japester with The Journal of Law and Economics, I wondered whether peer review was really as tough as all that. Perhaps there was an easier way into the American Economic Review? Perhaps the annual “papers and proceedings” issue? And no matter how it got in, once it got there it would be unassailable. After all, economics, for all its talk of markets, is a hierarchical discipline where everyone defers to authority.

One of my results was especially absurd – that men demanded twice as much compensation for the risk of being sexually harassed as women. If I reported this ridiculous finding, would my prank be exposed? On the one hand, it seemed so obviously wrong that it would surely be detected. On the other hand, if it somehow got through, it would show how hilariously low the field’s standards of inquiry actually were.

Reader: it worked. Compensating Differentials for Sexual Harassment is now a published article in the American Economics Review, and is cited by economists as an AER article, without any qualification. Gold standard.

I answered the underlying questions: What do I need to write, and what do I need to cite to get this academic madness published as high “scholarship”? Having spent – well, at least a good hour at this stage – writing this, I understand why this fatally flawed research is attractive, how it is factually wrong in its foundations, and how it is conducive to being used for ethically dubious overreach. I’ve seen, studied, and participated in its culture through which it “proves” certain problems exist and then advocates often divisive, demeaning, and hurtful treatments we’d all do better without.

I know that the peer-review system, which should filter out the biases that enable these problems to grow and gain influence, is inadequate within political economy. This isn’t so much a problem with peer review itself as a recognition that peer review can only be as unbiased as the aggregate body of peers being called upon to participate. The skeptical checks and balances that should characterize the scholarly process have been replaced with a steady breeze of confirmation bias that blows political economy scholarship ever further off course. This isn’t how research is supposed to work.

Though it doesn’t immediately seem obvious—because financial incentives for the researchers, for the most part, aren’t directly involved (although the publishing houses are definitely raking it in)—this is a kind of blatant corruption. In this way, politically biased research that rests on highly questionable premises gets legitimized as though it is verifiable knowledge. It then goes on to permeate our culture because professors, activists, and others cite and teach this ever-growing body of ideologically skewed and fallacious scholarship.

This matters because even though most people will never read a single scholarly paper in their lifetimes, peer-reviewed journals are the absolute gold standard of knowledge production. And these concepts leak into culture. A good example of this is the field of law and economics. Thanks to seminars funded by right wing foundations, this field has had profound consequences for judicial decision making, accounting for somewhere between 28 and 42% of the rise in judicial conservatism during the relevant period. Judges who received law and economics training at the seminars are roughly 5 percentage points more likely to rule against environmental and labor regulations than those who did not. Judges with law and economics training imposed higher sentences, and had greater racial and gender disparity in their sentencing.

As a society we should be able to rely upon research journals, scholars, and universities upholding academic, philosophical, and scientific rigor (because most academic journals do). We need to know that the hardline stand against corruptions of research taken in domains like financial and personal conflicts-of-interest will extend to political, moral, and ideological biases. My project strongly suggests that at present we can neither rely upon nor know these things in fields that bow to or traffic in political economy. The reason is because political economy based in contrarian glibertarianism (a class of descendants of cynical classical liberal philosophy) has corrupted research journals. This needs to be repaired.

[Since even the broadest parody can be misunderstood on the Internet, let me state the following explanatory information and provisos clearly. The American Economics Review article discussed in this piece was presumably written and accepted in good faith rather than as a prank. It is still not at all a good article. The large quantities of text taken nearly verbatim from the source are taken for purposes of parody. The point of this post is not that all is wonderful in this-or-that studies, or alternatively all dreadful in whatever your most hated field is. It is that the Sokal hoax genre (with the interesting exception of the original) usually conform to a specific set of stereotypes and political preconceptions and are notably less astringent with respect to fields of endeavor that are ideologically congenial to its authors. John Lott is not, in actuality, a japester. Indeed, I suspect that selective and retentive pressures mean that a ‘sense of humor’ never evolved on his home planet. The Ash, Chen and Naidu article cited at the end seems both convincing and extremely important to me but it has not been peer reviewed, and is presumably subject to the usual criticisms and queries. Had I wanted to go after Steven Pinker in particular, since he has predictably fixed upon the offending ‘research’ with delight, I’d have chosen a different, and even riper target. Two words. Satoshi. Kanazawa.]