[Golden Rule]

Originally Posted by representative_agent

I think it all depends on your measures of success. In academia, the general measure of success seems to be the number of publications in top journals and the number of citations. We all are surrounded by an academic environment and probably most of us consider this measure as legitimate. The first thing I do when I have a new professor for example is to check is publications.

I agree this generally true, and certainly I do this to evaluate economists whom I'm an unfamiliar with. But then getting esteem of my peers is not what matters most to me. I'd rather spend my life researching something I love and be mostly ignored, rather than research that I have no passion for while getting widespread acclaim. On the other hand, I think if you're getting totally ignored, it's a function of the topic you choose and how well you sell your research. Look at it this way, every good paper I've read in preparing for my field exams the last couple weeks, I could explain the fundamental purpose (i.e. WHY it's being written) to an open-minded outsider in a few sentences -- yes, even if it's a paper that's mostly focusing on necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of equilibria.

But will you be publishing in a top journal? And will you get citations? The 95th percentile paper has zero citations. And even the median JPE paper gets zero citations. In other words: nobody cares. I think that israelecon's 2% are a very optimistic guess.

I don't feel a citation is the be-all of happiness. You can write a good paper that explores a worthwhile topic that doesn't get cited yet still gets read and adds to the literature -- people know not to repeat what you just tried.

And what about your non-academic environment? Do they care about what you do? Will you be able to talk to them about what you do? A neuro-scientist can at least tell his children that he wants to understand how the picture gets from their eye into the brain and how this leads to actions by their hands. But do you really want to discuss the existence and stability of equilibria over dinner? My point is that people outside your field will rarely be able to understand and value what you do (except if you are Steven Levitt). Your children cannot tell their friends what their father or mother does.
Don't get me wrong.

OK, this is the part that worked me up the most. You're making a totally unfair comparison. You can sell economic research to children in a way that makes sense in the greater good of the world -- but the end results, not the tools to get there. You make a false analogy. I mean, what does a molecular biologist tell their kids? That they're studying the origins of life? Yes. Or do they go over the mechanical details of their polymerase chain reactions during countless tedious hours of lab? Of course not. It's the same difference. These existence theorems are tools to validate the models we create, not ends of themselves.

I'm very excited about economics and about doing research. But I think we should do it for the right reasons. And we should know the price. I think that if your goal is to "make an impact", you risk being very disappointed in 30 years from now. You'll hardly ever get to hear a "thank you" for what you do.
Asked why he still goes on doing research, Reinhard Selten said: "because I have to".

I've known middle-aged economists with the "because I have to" attitude and I pity them. I enjoy every aspect of economic research to the extent that I can still get a good night's sleep. I expect the research I do to "make an impact" but not in the sense that you seem to describing. I think every published paper adds something to our knowledge, and I'm happy taking small steps to larger goals even if I don't fully realize them myself.