Peer review not sacrosanct
Peer review, the sacred cow of the scholarly world, is often a hurdle that those of us with less-than-conventional ideas sometimes find difficult to overcome. Thomas Stossel, American Cancer Society Professor at the Harvard Medical School, recently put the process in perspective: "Anonymous peer review by jealous competitors has its merits, but it has a tendency to select for fashionable if relatively unoriginal and inoffensive papers." (Wall Street Journal, December 30, 2005, p. A10.)
Admirers of Mises, of course, know what his peers did to him in the United States in general and at NYU in particular. And then there was Socrates, who was executed by his peer reviewers, and Galileo, who was put under house arrest by his.
Thomas Kuhn (in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) observed that one aim of establishment science is to prevent the emergence of new ideas; peer review seems to be a good way to accomplish this. Sometimes peer review seems akin to having two or three movie critics determine whether or not a new movie should be released to the public (or have to undergo “major revisions� before it will be accepted). Some years ago I read a colleague’s paper that was in press; when I pointed out an inconsistency between two sections of his paper, he replied that that’s what he had to put in to pacify two reviewers.
The trouble with reviewers (of all types, peer or otherwise) is that they tend to evaluate new material based on how they, the reviewers, would have written the article, book, screenplay, etc., rather than by accepting the author’s premise, then judging the execution. The bottom line of peer review is that one must respect the peer who is doing the reviewing; that’s not always possible in today’s intellectual climate. Unfortunately, Stossel ended his op-ed piece by praising the FDA for its more stringent research requirements, that is, more stringent than those of academic journals. Maybe. But one can only wonder what scholarship would be like in a truly free market, absent government-financed schools and government-financed journals.
Comments (6)
In the engineering world, there is the engineer (by), and several other engineers (check, review, approve, etc.). The originating engineer's obligation is total. While the checker's obligation is to challenge the engineer on particular points, the checker bears no responsibility for the work product. If the engineered device fails, the originating engineer is called out onto the carpet.
It is really too bad that no such accountability can be present in scholarly works.
Published: January 3, 2006 1:00 PM
The "Academic Industrial Complex" is about as pernicious as the Military Industrial Complex or Medical Pharmaceutical Complex, etc. I had a moment of silence after reading your lament re what could've been....there's a rich source for counterfactual investigation.
Published: January 3, 2006 6:00 PM
Peer-reviewing, and avoiding new ideas, is not the problem. In fact, new ideas are much more likely to be bad than good. Surely it is much better to "err on the side of caution", than to think "it's outrageous, but we'll consider it." Nobody would ever get anywhere if we could not choose to ignore anything. It is true that Mises, Bruno, etc., had a hard time of things, but what about other purveyors of new ideas or relatively new popularisers, like Marx, Kuhn, Pol Pot, Lenin, Keynes, Popper? Surely, you believe the world would be a better place if none of these half-wits were given a hearing. It is true that we Austrians might be "less-than-conventional", but so are the Arab terrorists!
I agree, obviously, that there is a problem with mainstream economics, and perhaps no ideas, no matter how bad, could make it even worse. But the problem is not their inability to accept new ideas, it is that they already have or that they have accepted the wrong ones. Who cares if they don't accept new ideas, it is right ideas they should be accepting. If you wish to convince the mainstream that they are wrong, I do not think trying to get published in a journal they run, is the way to go. You might as well suggest that Rothbard should have been elected President, or at least the Democratic candidate.
I hope that peer-review absent government schools and subsidies would still exist. Imagine the cost of postage for your million page journal!
Gil Guillory: Surely you are not suggesting that in economics we set up an experiment, maybe just in a small country, where we see whether the proposed economic policy results in starvation, or the rise of a tyrant, or perhaps the re-election of the incumbents, or the rewarding of a subsidy to the researchers, etc.
Happylee: In your counterfactual investigation don't forget to include what would happen if things were different and (say) Hitler did not commit suicide, but instead diverted his attention to elaborating Keynesian economics. Or what would happen if things were different and Samuelson was an Austrian, maybe we would not know about him, because he would not be popular. And what if things were different and ... but as Bertie Wooster once said, "if things were different ... but then, they never are."
David Stove said all this, and much better than I. I will make his writings available soon.
Published: January 3, 2006 9:59 PM
This reminds of the paper by Hwang et al. published in science in 2004 that purported to show the first stem cells obtained from a cloned human embryo. It turns out he falsified his data. Peer review is not designed to catch this.
Published: January 4, 2006 6:53 AM
In a world without government funding of school, Im afraid much of the research would be dedicated to demonstrating why state subsidies of education would be desirable. Intellectuals, no less than other people, want to feel important.
Published: January 4, 2006 9:26 AM
The faulty assumption is that institutions can produce peers for all ideas.
Nature doesn't pretend that all soils exist; civilization does.
The cheap internet I offered in 1970 did not pretend that all possible matches existed; it merely offered myriad centers for decentralization.
Published: January 4, 2006 11:48 AM