Social media has infiltrated all aspects of life, and academia is no exception. For the last decade, economists on Twitter (or ‘#EconTwitter’) has become an increasingly robust community. Many have hailed it as an overwhelmingly positive, collegial, and collaborative virtual space. And to a certain extent, it is.
I personally have connected with many amazing economists, social scientists, and journalists in ways that would not have been otherwise possible. However, the positivity, collegiality, and collaboration quickly evaporate if you dare to criticize the institutional hierarchies of the discipline, in a way that is perhaps also the case with the real network of economists.
Last week, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economics Sciences in the Memory of Alfred Nobel, or the “Nobel prize” in economics, was awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson of Stanford University for their contribution to developments in Auction Theory. Without casting any aspersions on the quality of the theoretical advances produced by Milgrom and Wilson, I argued that perhaps this was not the year in which we needed to celebrate once again advances in abstract microeconomic theory and the continued hyper-mathematization of economics, produced by white men educated in and working from elite universities in the United States who have been manning the discipline's gate for decades. Why?
