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Monday, March 18, 2024

Toxic Econ - Part 2

We have in the past posted stories about the website EJMR https://www.econjobrumors.com/ (now XJMR) which caters to academic economists, originally to help job candidates, but has limited moderation. Bloomberg is the latest source of information about the website in a very lengthy article. Some excerpts: 

...Started in 2008 as a website to help Ph.D. students and professors navigate academia’s opaque job market, it soon became a forum for everything from ivory tower gossip to chatter about food or personal technology. (Recent, less inflammatory topics: “Canadian school flyouts,” “Headline CPI increases to 3.2%” and “Pokemon is morally evil.”)

Over the years, the site has also developed a reputation as a swamp of misogyny and racism, with a strict moderation policy but lax enforcement that’s earned it comparisons to 4Chan, the ugly online forum. (Recent, more inflammatory topics on EJMR: “Would you ever hire a hot grad student as a postdoc?,” “Why do feminists, critical theorists, postcolonial writers, etc know so little” and “Does tenure allow me to refuse teaching black people?” Those are just the printable ones.)

By the mid-2010s, the site had hundreds of thousands of visitors a month...

The culture war over EJMR has had implications for the profession, too. For decades, advocates for equality in economics have argued that the lack of women and minorities results in blinkered, narrow-minded policy (for example, not prioritizing research on child care or on the effects of incarceration). Economics as a field can’t address real-world problems, they say, unless it first looks like the real world. Over the years, EJMR had become a symbol of that imbalance as well as a bastion of resistance to change. Its targets have included Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economics professor who’s won recognition for her research on families and inequality, and Claudia Sahm, a former senior economist at the Federal Reserve who in a 2020 blogpost titled “Economics Is a Disgrace” denounced the profession as sexist, racist and elitist.

EJMR’s influence has grown despite attempts to shut it down or create sanitized alternatives. In some cases, anonymous attacks that started on the site eventually broke through into mainstream discourse. In December 2023, conservative activists published what they said was evidence that Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized her dissertation, which added to an already-raging firestorm over the school’s response to the war in Gaza and led to her resignation. An anonymous post on EJMR had made a similar claim months before. (Gay has said she’s never misrepresented her findings or took credit for others’ research.)...

[The article then goes on to describe how a subset of supposedly anonymous posts were traced to specific institutions.]
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Posts on Economics Job Market Rumors
Share of all posts from US universities or research institutions on the site

Sources: Ederer, Goldsmith-Pinkham, Jensen; U.S. News & World Report
Share is the percentage of posts accounted for by the school or institution among all posts originating from IP addresses associated with US universities or research institutions. U.S. News economics graduate school rankings are for 2023-24.
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Our earlier post on EJMR-XMJR:
https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/07/toxic-econ.html. It features a chart based on the percent of posts from various universities were classified as "toxic." The website has expanded to math, poli sci, and sociology, but seems less comprehensive and active in those fields. A still earlier post from 2017: https://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/08/bias-in-econ.html.

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