economist catfight

First Krugman makes a snarky comment about the grownups coming (though I seem to have heard that one before, a few years ago, how did that work out?).

Then Greg Mankiw gets all in a snit about it.
So, Krugman has to apologise, sort of.

Ok, I start to see some of the disadvantages of non-pseudonymous blogging for academics.

But, that is now what is interesting about this.

What is interesting about this is that Greg Mankiw points to a standard ranking of economists' academic accomplisments, and compares positions.

'course Krugman outranks Mankiw... shouldn't it stop there?

But, we're not done yet, what is truly astonishing is that this authoritative ranking has Amartya Sen at 157th, and James Mirrlees at 375th!

Do these people not understand what "Master of Trinity" entails?
I mean forgetting about that whole Nobel prize thing.

Actually the ranking looks funky, just judging from the poor correlation between different rankings for the top 10.

It would be amusing, and probably scary, to see a similar ranking in the physical sciences.
Fortunately we always have Feynman to point to.
Few papers, few cites, few topcites.
SPIRES entry.
I mean, his SPIRES h-index is only 27!

Ranking: high.

Tags

More like this

Writing a blog is for me (1) amusing and (2) amusing. Can anyone take anything that I write on a blog seriously? Well sometimes people do. Many eons ago (okay, I lie, it was 2005), I wrote a post about the then new "h-index." The h-index is an attempt at trying to find a better way of "ranking…
Which is a better metric of faculty research performance, H or G? I already pontificated about the Hirsch index - where you rank your published papers by citation rank, and the H-index is the largest number such that you have k papers with the number of cites greater than or equal to k. It is an…
A repost of a November 28, 2008 post: The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become…
The other night, at the meeting of the Science Communicators of North Carolina, the highlight of the event was a Skype conversation with Chris Brodie who is currently in Norway on a Fulbright, trying to help the scientists and science journalists there become more effective in communicating…

I think Mankiw's point is perfectly valid:

Judging by this objective criterion, it looks like the two adminstrations are drawing economists from roughly the same talent pool.

By Highly-ranked … (not verified) on 27 Nov 2008 #permalink