Coming soon: Talk at the Top
Standard Error's new podcast with Samantha Eyler-Driscoll and Olivier Simard-Casanova
In this new series—launching next week with a special episode for job market season—small-time social media celebrities and Standard Error partners Sam and Olivier trade tips on how to talk, write, and publish like an insider in economics.
Academic economics has a lot of rules that nobody quite writes down.
How do you know whether a contribution is interesting? How much context does a reader need? What makes an introduction feel convincing? How should you position a paper in the literature? When is a claim too strong? What does a finished paper look like?
These are not simply questions of grammar or style. They are part of the professional knowledge required to participate successfully in academic economics—and much of that knowledge is learned informally, through advisors, colleagues, seminars, workshops, and proximity to people who already know the rules.
That matters because when professional knowledge remains tacit, access to it is uneven. Academic economics shows longstanding patterns of elite closure, and one way those patterns reproduce themselves is through unequal access to the conventions and expectations that determine which research gets recognized, circulated, and published.
At Standard Error, we think making some of that knowledge explicit is one small way to push back against that closure. Good research should not depend on the researcher having already learned an unwritten professional language.
That is the idea behind Talk at the Top, our new podcast about the practices and conventions that shape academic research and publishing. We want to make some of the tacit knowledge of academic economics more visible and more available—particularly to researchers who may not have access to it through their institutions or professional networks.
For our first episode, Standard Error founder and lead editor Samantha Eyler-Driscoll and partner and researcher Olivier Simard-Casanova talk about the job market paper.
A JMP is not just a piece of research. It is also a demonstration of how you think as a researcher: how you identify a question, define the limits of an argument, establish a contribution, anticipate an audience, and make your work legible as an important contribution to the field.
We talk about why those skills are often harder to learn than the technical ones, why writing the paper backwards from the presentation can get you into trouble, and why a strong JMP requires knowing not just what you have found, but how to communicate what it means.
Come back next week for our Talk at the Top pilot “Season of Dread: How to Write a JMP and Live to Tell About It.”
