A recent paper in Nature concludes that share of disruptive research in the social sciences has fallen precipitously, even more so than in the actual sciences. Where are the big new ideas?
analyses citation data from 1945 to 2010 to assess the disruptiveness of papers and patents. The authors consider new work to be disruptive if later work that cites it is less likely to also mention its predecessors. The paper concludes that the share of disruptive research in the social sciences has fallen precipitously, even more so than in the actual sciences.
In New Orleans economics’s biggest names offered ideas that were fresh and interesting, but hardly breakthroughs on the scale of, say, the Nash equilibrium or the idea of asymmetric information. Gita Gopinath, the’s chief economist, discussed research on how the economics of international finance has shifted since the seminal work of Robert Mundell and Marcus Fleming in the 1960s.
New theories without robust empirical support can be dangerous, as demonstrated by the rise of central planning during the 20th century. And big advances are easier to spot in hindsight. It may even turn out that there were some hidden among the presentations in New Orleans. Some conference attendees were also more optimistic about the present state of affairs.
Yet the most compelling evidence on the impact of monetary policy on inflation came from Christina Romer of the University of California, Berkeley, who dusted off an old-fashioned method. In her talk, she argued that monetary-policy changes have bigger effects on unemployment than inflation, and that it sometimes takes a few years for their main impact to be felt.
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