The not-really-secret of scientific peer review is that you can get any old shit published somewhere. The problem with economics is that it publishes shit in its "top-tier" journals.

Actually, the real problem with the journal culture in economics is that it lacks second-tier journals - which is where all the scientific legwork gets done, as anybody who has ever compared, say, Nature and Physical Review Letters side-by-side will know.

So what you have in economics is three top-tier journals, which can get away with publishing any old shit which is Novel and Interesting, because there are no second-tier journals around to push them to at least make a cursory check that it is also methodologically sound and empirically relevant. And then you have a vast gulf of nothing at all until the third-tier specialist journals start. Which are, as in all fields, a somewhat mixed bag.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.