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Two questions: do you find the AER interesting?; and,
why is Lance Taylor at the New School, rather than a
CAE?
Hey Max, I came late tohis thread: what's been said about Lance.
When he was being recruited to the New School, he met with students and proclaimed (after we were giving him a hard time): "Well, I am a world-class economist." But the problem isn't so much with that kind of attitude, but with the absolute obsession/fixation with "presitige." Top to bottom, as times get tough, the CAEs get greater and greater power in an inverse proportion to their relevance. Name-recognition supercedes all critical facilities - especially among academics!
I would concede that CAE output averages a higher level
of rigor (with significant variance), but rigor is often
confused with ideology (with unfair implications for
individuals' professional interests) or policy-irrelevance.
Rigor in the interests of replacing established theories
is often not welcome, as a young visiting prof from a CAE
at the U of Md. complained to me some years ago.
Line overheard at recent AEA meetings:
"He's hasn't done anything for months.
He's not doing anything. He's doing . . .
policy."
Ask yourself, why can't econ Ph.D.s get jobs? Basically, "market" for econ majors/students is "signaling" a profound excess supply. I'd like to believe that this "rationalization" of the workforce is due to its own intellectual bankruptcy - but I doubt it.
Jason