Book review: Doing Economics

Last year, I reviewed The Economist's Craft by Michael Weisbach and noted that:

The book does an excellent job of exposing the tacit knowledge of academia - the things that academic economists otherwise learn 'on the job', from the PhD through to the end of their academic career.

Weisbach's book was published in 2021, and barely a year later Marc Bellamare's 2022 book Doing Economics was released. The overlap in the two titles is extensive, as both aim to reveal and explain the tacit knowledge of academic work as an economist. Bellamare's book is subtitled, "what you should have learned in grad school - but didn't".

While I was highly impressed with Weisbach's book, I actually think that Bellamare does an even better job of collating the important advice. The book is separated into several chapters, each devoted to one aspect of work as an academic economist: writing papers; giving talks, navigating peer review, finding funding, doing service, and advising students. Each chapter outlines the key things that academic economists need to know, and importantly, the intended audience is not students in top US PhD programmes, and this may be one aspect that sets this book apart from Weibach's earlier book. Bellamare was unsuccessful in getting tenure at a top university, and is a Professor at the University of Minnesota (which, to be fair, is still a good university - it's just not Cornell, where he did his PhD, or Duke, where he was an assistant professor), and that may explain the different focus.

I must admit a certain amount of bias in preferring this book though. Bellamare's advice is scarily similar to advice that I already give to students. So, recommending this book is a little like recommending my own advice. For example, Bellamare recommends developing skills in writing and understanding the literature by engaging in what the American philosopher Mortimer Adler referred to as 'inspectional reading':

...reading the introduction, looking at the methods and results, and (maybe) reading the conclusion before moving on to the next item on one's reading list.

While I don't recommend this to PhD students, it is an approach that I frequently recommend for undergraduate students, such as those in the Waikato Economics Discussion Group. Bellamare also recommends that, in terms of reviewing journal articles:

...the first journal you ever send a paper to sends out your manuscript to two reviewers, and they both recommend that your paper be accepted "as is." This means that for your one submission, you have benefited from two reviewers giving your manuscript a thorough read. In this hypothetical scenario, for the system to work, you should perform at least two reviews.

This 'net zero' approach to the number of reviews to undertake is one that I have applied for many years, of course noting that the exact number of reviews to undertake depends on whether the papers you submit have co-authors, how many different journals you submit to that provide reviewer comments, and so on. Bellamare moderates this advice though, by noting that early on, emerging researchers should review as often as possible, as that gives them exposure to bad papers as well as good papers, and is an excellent learning tool. In my career, I did far more reviewing when I was a new and emerging academic, almost never refusing a request to complete a review (I'm a lot more selective now). As Bellamare notes:

Many economists see refereeing as an unfortunate tax they need to pay to get their own papers reviewed and published. Unlike a tax, however, there is almost always something to be learned from reviewing - and from reviewing widely.

And on responding to reviewers, Bellamare suggests an exhaustive approach that is very similar to my practice, which involves copying the new text from the revised paper into the response to reviewers, so that reviewers don't need to refer back to the paper to confirm that you have addressed their comments. It's an approach that works wonders in getting papers accepted from the revise-and-resubmit stage, without further rounds of review.

The book has so much good advice, that it is difficult to do justice to it. However, not all of the advice is good. When discussing poster presentations, Bellamare starts by noting that "I must confess to having never prepared a poster for presentation at a conference". He probably should have stopped there, as the advice on posters is not great. There are resources that he could have used to provide some value in this section, but instead the advice is banal and largely unhelpful.

Nevertheless, that is a small gripe about a book that is otherwise excellent. The outline of Keith Head's formula for the introduction of a paper (which you can read here) is a great reminder of how to structure that section of a paper. There are also great sections on what to put in an abstract, and why separate literature review sections are generally unnecessary for most journal articles.

Current or future PhD students and early career researchers should definitely read this book, and supervisors of PhD students should recommend that their students read it. While I previously considered giving my PhD students a copy of Weisbach's book when they reach confirmed enrolment (after the first six months of their PhD journey, when their full research proposal is complete and has been approved), I'm going to switch to this book instead. Or perhaps, I will give them one, and encourage them to read the other. Highly recommended!