| HN Mirror

The quantity of citation, within an echo-chamber, means nothing to me. Academia is in its own world, and it is very easy for academic papers to become increasingly divorced from reality, since there is no mechanism for overall accountability. This is common across many institutions throughout history, such as with scholasticism and the Catholic Church. Also, academia is highly politicized, and people cite what they believe they want to be true, and rationalize after the fact. The process of becoming an academic is now so fraught and grueling, that only people who buy into the overall methodology and way of thinking will go to grad school and join the mandarinate. So quantity of citation among the same group who all share the same biases, is not proof of anything.

I lost my respect for academic papers in college when taking a political science course. We were reading these absolutely absurd mathematical models of how bureaucracies made decisions. Having interned in various parts of government, I found the whole thing absurd. Bureaucracy is actually very interesting, there are many great books on the topic, there are many great memoirs that can aid in understanding what goes on. But we were reading none of them. I told my professor as such, and she had no defense, she said that was just the way political science was done. The entire field was completely divorced from reality, and producing nothing of actual value to someone who wanted to learn about bureaucracy. They were in their own bubble of citing and building upon each other's esoteric models that had nothing to do with how the world actually works.

Further reading since then, in reading many economic papers, then comparing what happens in the real world, in reading computer science papers, and then seeing how divorced it is from real world problems, has only reinforced my view.

Academia does produce some good stuff. But there are a lot of bubbles of useless paper-writing, and a lot of politicized research. So now I only trust output that I have verified or that has been widely replicated by people outside the bubble.

As for this paper in particular, it makes some big assumptions - that immigrant labor is an imperfect substitute, that natural resources don't matter, that increasing immigration will increase the amount of capital, etc. If I adopt the same assumptions, I am sure I could construct a mathematical model to replicate the author's results. But all those assumptions are very dubious, and yet the author spends little time justifying them. So this paper adds nothing to the debate over immigration, because it does not justify its assumptions, and it is these assumptions which are the core of the issue.

Although my argument may be wrong, at least they're cited (by me and over 2000 other peer-reviewed articles, for what its worth).

Citing useless/irrelevant articles that you have not read and verified yourself, and claiming these articles are "facts" when they are really interpretations and models that hinge on layers of debatable assumptions, is much worse than citing nothing at all. (I didn't leave citations on my comments because I'm providing interpretations for people who already share the same facts and background knowledge, if you don't share the same facts, you can ask for citations on particular statements, but I may not have time to actually hunt them down at the moment).

Here's the The Economist on wages and immigration written for the lay person, lest I may Euler you.

Umm, this is simply the Economist parroting the point of the Euler-er, the Economist is not adding value. Periodicals like the economist are written by journalists who generally have little life experience or domain expertise. They went straight to journalism out of college, and so they default to just accepting academic papers as being the authoritative word, because they do not know better.