Substack and Magazines, Online and Off
I like Substack. It’s a good way to write an article and get it posted online and emailed to interested people. Some subscribe, and I can point others to the address, or let them know on Twitter. And I can continue to improve the articles after publication, if I want to, and remove them, if I decide they boring or stupid.
Over my life, I’ve published a half-dozen or so op-eds and seventy or so academic journal articles. Now, I feel no desire to go through the process of submitting my work for other people to publish. I’d rather let them come to me. If anybody wants to publish some of my Substack work in a magazine, just let me know. I’ll see if the Substack people have any objection, and work any problems out with them. If you pay me, I’ll give them a cut of the proceeds. I can also rewrite to be suitable for another publication.
The same is true for academic work. I have two working papers under submission to scholarly journals right now, “Ostracism in Japan” with J. Mark Ramseyer and “Splitting a Pie: Mixed Strategies in Bargaining under Complete Information” with Christopher Connell. Mainly, I’m submitting them because my co-authors like it, but for readership, circulating them ourselves would probably do better if we put our minds to it. Maybe I’ll put them up on Substack, as well as on my website, so as to make it easier for people to leave comments. I don’t need the publications for my vitae; I’m retired, and my vitae is plenty long already anyway. Economics professors don’t read journals nowadays. They read working papers posted on the Net and they do google searches for articles relevant to what they’re working on. I think we’ll move eventually to individuals websites like those of Chicago/Hoover economist John Cochrane and Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman, who blog on various issues that connect with their academic work, bringing in enough technicalities to make the blogs scholarly, but fun for scholars to read (unlike the journals). (Warning: if you don’t know a lot of economics and statistics, they probably aren’t fun to read.)
Academic journals in economics have two uses, which are linked together. One is Certification. It is very hard to get your paper accepted, so it is a sign of hard work and talent that is very useful for deciding whom to hire and who should get tenure. The other is Comments. Getting someone to read you scholarly papers and give you comments is no easy task. Journal referees do it for the sake of the profession, and because they are anonymous they can be appropriately blunt and critical, and the editors give them deadlines.
I don’t need Certification, but I do need Comments. In economics, nobody is so good he doesn’t yearn for comments, for people to find the mistakes in his papers, to suggest ways to improve exposition, to suggest extensions, and to disclose ways readers might be misled. The young scholar wants to have his paper published; the old scholar wants someone to find the mistakes in his paper before it gets published. We in academia need to figure out a better method than Journals for both of these things, Certification and Comment. I’ll leave that for another day, but Comments are welcomed.