A backlash is building against inflation—the kind showing up in economics journals.

The average length of a published economics paper has more than tripled over the past four decades, and some academics are sick of wading through them. At this year’s American Economics Association conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Autor compared a 94-page working paper about the minimum wage to “being bludgeoned to death with a Nerf bat” and started a Twitter hashtag, #ThePaperIsTooDamnedLong.

“It was a very good paper,” Mr. Autor said in a later interview, but it set him off because it represented the “logorrhea of our current state of scholarship.”

Let’s get to the point: Economists want economists to talk less. The AEA announced last year it would launch a journal dedicated to publishing only concise papers, at least by economists’ standards—nothing longer than 6,000 words, or about 15 double-spaced pages. (For comparison, this article is a svelte 967 words.)

“Certainly not all papers should be short,” said MIT economist Amy Finkelstein, founding editor of what’s being called American Economic Review: Insights. “But on the other hand, not all papers should be long.”