Talk at the Top
Introducing Our Talk at the Top Series: How Economists Talk (and Write) for Each Other and Why You Need to Know
A recent edition of Adam Tooze’s Chartbook highlighted the WaPo coverage of Anna Stansbury and Robert Schultz’s paper on the declining socioeconomic diversity of economics PhDs—a phenomenon that Tooze referred to as “elite closure” within the discipline. Elite closure, documented in the context of economics by sociologist Marion Fourcade and coauthors in their memorable work on the “superiority of economics”, refers to sociological processes whereby elite groups in hierarchical social structures interact mostly with each other, leading to tight, insular networks with shared habits, norms, tropes, and ways of being that in turn serve as social designators of who can belong (or not) at the top.
Elite Closure and Language
Linguistics research has argued for decades that language itself is universally a key mechanism of enacting such social closure among elites: in 1993, linguist Carol Myers-Scotton wrote that “elite closure is accomplished when the elite successfully employ official language policies and their own nonformalized language use patterns to limit access of nonelite groups to political position and socioeconomic advancement.”
Top 5-itis: A Symptom of Elite Closure
The Top 5—the handful of prestigious economics publications whose editors and referees can either bless or doom a research career—are notoriously a key terrain on which this (tyrannical) social closure plays out in economics. (During her tenure as editor of the American Economic Review, Esther Duflo reportedly remarked that publication in the AER was restricted not by space constraints but by referees’ disproportionate negativity, complaining, “[A submission] is just a paper in the AER, it’s not some divine piece coming down.”) It’s precisely the nonformalized, noncodified character of publishing expectations in the Top 5 that makes the submission process so unnerving and often bewildering (and, as Mike Makowsky has recently argued, in some cases even radicalizing), especially for junior researchers or those writing in English as a second language.
What You Need to Know and How Standard Error Can Help
Demystifying editors’ and referees’ expectations and giving researchers the (often only privately communicated) information that they need navigate the process of submitting to the Top 5 is integral to our mission at Standard Error. To this end, in an ongoing blog series, Talk at the Top, we will share provocative insider insights and information that we stumble upon in our amblings around academia and the web. We hope that these insights serve to replenish our readers’ resources in their encounters with the dynamics of social closure in economics.
Sobel’s “Mourning edition” offers an authoritative peek at the mechanics of peer review in economics
Explore the insights of Joel Sobel, a former top-5 editor, in his reflective piece “Mourning Edition.” Delve into the mechanics of peer review in economics, learn about submitting research, handling rejections, and the role of referees.