Federico Fubini wries: RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) arguably provides the closest thing to a credible hierarchy of economists, not unlike the ATP’s rankings of professional tennis players. The site, entirely open and free maintains a decentralized online database of around two million items of economic research, including working papers, journal articles, books, and software. Its index of influence assesses the number of citations for each author, weighted by impact and discounted by citation age (otherwise, Adam Smith and Karl Marx would likely still top the list).
Because the ranking is updated every month, RePEc enables one to track which economists are viewed by their peers as the most influential over time. So I compared the rankings from December 2006 and September 2015 to see whether the RePEc index had evolved along with economic reality.
It had not. Despite the profound – and largely unpredicted – financial and economic turmoil of the intervening decade, the intellectual influence of those whose theories suffered the most evidently remains undented.
After a succession of bursting multi-trillion-dollar credit bubbles, you might wonder what to make of Robert Lucas’s view that rational expectations enable perfectly calculating “agents” to maximize economic utility. You might also want to rethink Eugene Fama’s efficient markets hypothesis, according to which prices of financial assets always reflect all available information about economic fundamentals.
You must not be an economist. In fact, Lucas and Fama both moved up in the RePEc rankings during the period I examined, from 30 to nine and from 23 to 17, respectively. And the persistence at the top is striking across the board. Among the top ten economists in September 2015, six were already there in December 2006, and another two were ranked 11 and 13.
What is remarkable about this is the difference between the pace of change in the ranking of economists and in the economy itself. Entry barriers among the world’s ten richest people and ten most valuable companies seem to be far lower than among the top ten economists. According to Forbes, only two of the ten wealthiest individuals in 2015 (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) were in the top ten in 2006. And just three companies – ExxonMobil, General Electric, and Microsoft – made the top ten in terms of market capitalization in both 2006 and 2015.
In the rankings of economists, by contrast, criteria such as gender or geographic origin confirm the overall inertia. Only four women made the RePEc top 200 in September 2015, compared to three in December 2006, and two were included on both lists.
The rest of the RePEC top 200 tend to be Caucasian men in their 60s and older – roughly three decades past the age when an economic or scientific author is generally most innovative, according to research by the economist Benjamin Jones. No black person, American or otherwise, is in the top 200.
How surprised should we be that, even after the Great Recession cast grave doubt on the rational-market theories so dominant a decade ago, the top tier of academic economics remains largely unchanged?
Might the world’s leading economists be so keen to protect their own ideas that they ignore (or, worse, stifle) innovation from unexpected quarters?
For a group of people so committed to free markets and so enamored of “creative destruction,” that is a question that urgently needs to be addressed. The answer may hold enormous implications not only for intellectual growth, but also for human welfare.