Skipping the math

From Felix Salmon:

Justin Fox sums up the overwhelming majority of economics papers in one sentence:

The basic form of an academic economics paper is a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the beginning and a couple of comprehensible paragraphs at the end, with a bunch of really-hard-to-follow math or statistical analysis in the middle.

What he doesn’t (need to) mention is the way that journalists, myself included, read economics papers: we generally have no ability or inclination to try to understand the details of the formulae and regression analyses, so we confine ourselves to reading the stuff in English, and work on the general assumption that the mathematics is reasonably solid.

The problem of course is that we really have no basis for making that general assumption: we make it not because we think it’s particularly justified or justifiable, but because we don’t have any choice. What’s more, because we’re always interested in what’s new, and because we have easy access to the internet and little access to expensive journals, we gravitate to preprints at sites like SSRN, rather than papers which have gone through peer review.