Understanding Academic Success and Influence in One Picture

|Peter Boettke|

Sometimes debates flar up on blogs, FB and Twitter and other forms of social media about what influence academics have and how would one measure influence in a scientific discipline.  I think these debates often overlook very simple measurements.  If you teach a scientific discipline to college kids, how many of those kids become majors.  If you teach majors in your discipline, how many decide to go to graduate school.  If you teach graduate students, how many decide to be professors.  If you teach future professors, how many of them will be able to generate majors, graduate students and future professors in their own careers.

So you want to know who has had influence in the discipline of economics, look at the number of PhD students that Stanley Fischer has supervised and what they have done with their respective careers.  Or you could just look at this picture (circa 2009) of the academic flower of Thomas Sargent.

Enough said.  If you aren't in the game, you aren't playing -- you are watching.  If you want to be a player, you have to figure out a way to get in the game.  Don't confuse playing your own game in your backyard, with actually playing the game.  And also don't pretend that we don't know how to measure these things -- we do, and its sort of like baseball batting averages, or fielding percentages.  Folks like Stan Fischer or Tom Sargent have Hall of Fame numbers, and they respectively changed the way the game is played for good or bad based on their work.  That is influence.  If you don't have those numbers, you don't have a Hall of Fame career.  And no Hall of Fame career, then no influence.

End runs around a scientific discipilne might make you feel less frustrated, and certainly there is a lot in the discipline to be frustrated with, but as I wrote in discussing Buchanan's "Dishwater of the Orthodoxy" the solution isn't to either avoid the kitchen or learn to swim, but the scientific innovators learn how to successfully unclog the drain and wash away the dull, dead, drab, and dirty, and replace with fresh new flows of ideas about methodology, method, and application.

Economics as a dsicipline is an intellectual adventure.  Be curious, be relentless, be hungry for knowledge, track truth in your studies, think clearly, writer clearly, and speak clearly.

Comments

[Craig Brown]

In addition to crude metrics like "number of students mentored", you also mention it is important to note what those students "have done with their respective careers". This kind of academic influence can be captured quite eloquently by why what SNA researchers call "eigenvector centrality". Using this relative measure (or a more general notion of it) allows one to rank individuals in terms of their connections to other highly influential “nodes” in a graph.

Can anyone think of an economist whose academic flower may not bloom quite as full as Sargent's, but who perhaps changed the minds of “the right people” (individuals whose own influence was then used to spread the initial idea far and wide)?

[Dermot Gilley]

I am not sure if these metrics are always a good measure. While in a time before a Kuhn scientific revolution a well-versed professor might spawn many followers, I doubt that this measure captures academic prowess correctly. While i do not know the numbers, I could imagine that Immanuel Kant or Einstein were not as "prolific" as Sargent but maybe they left a greater legacy that defies measurements. And having said that, I have a feeling that if all these foundations and states that fund public education and research funnel their moneys into academic fields according to such "performance" indicators they may well create more mediocrity than Kants.

[Rodrigo]

Good post! Please correct discipline in the last paragraph.

[Dermot Gilley]

Well, if we're into typos, I have another one: "debates flarE up on blogs" not "flar".

[Phil B]

Which way to influence is the correct path? Comparative advantage. Let people do what they do best - reaching the public outside academia; shifting the scene within academia; publishing a paper, starting a blog, making a you tube channel.

In comparison to another organization - we are familiar with - debating which way is better misses the point of comparative advantage. If you have a frustration or deaf ear in dealing with academics but articulate passion for general public audiences you will be less than useless making presentations to professors. Hence, to all game players - you wouldn't want them there anyway as it would just confuse and cause problems for you and what you are trying to do. Good, don't miss them.

That being said, today, I need no further convincing of the effectiveness - carried out by those whose comparative advantage lies in down this avenue - of "playing the game," then seeing an add for Chris Coynes "Doing Bad by Doing Good" in Foreign Affairs magazine right smack in the middle of a Mark Leonard (head of European Council on Foreign Relations). I'd say thats serious progress.

[Barkley Rosser]

Let me just note that some of the most influential economists in history had zero students. So, this post is a bit overstated.