As economics has become more technical and economic theory more abstract and mathematical, applied fields have proliferated. Writing in the 1940s, Schumpeter distinguished between five types of applied field. The first type comprised fields such as money and banking that were widely considered part of general economics but were taught separately so that they could be treated in more detail. A second type included fields such as actuarial science and insurance that were separate from economics for purely historical reasons. The third included fields based on public policy, such as agriculture, labour, transport and public finance. The last two comprised a mixture of fields such as socialism and comparative economic systems and area studies. Reflecting on this, he commented:
There is evidently no permanence or logical order to this jumble of applied fields. Nor are there definite frontier lines to any of them. They appear or vanish, they increase or decrease in relative importance, and they overlap with one another as changing interests and methods dictate. And… this is as it should be.1
It would be possible to make very similar remarks about the situation at the end of the twentieth century. However, in the second half of the century the situation had changed in several ways. One was that the division of the subject into applied fields became institutionalized. Applied fields ceased to be simply convenient labels attached to courses offered to students, but began to be reflected in the way in which the profession was organized. Much more than in the 1940s, they acquired their own societies, conferences and journals. The most obvious sign was the proliferation of specialist journals. Economists working within applied fields began to talk much more to each other rather than to economists in general.
However, a second development was that economics came increasingly to be viewed as having a theoretical ‘core' that is applied to different problems. The core comprises micro- and macroeconomics, which are then applied – along with econometrics (seen primarily as a body of statistical techniques) – to problems such as labour, development, money, the public sector and so on. This hierarchy is reflected in the fact that most degree programmes will require training in core subjects, but will allow students to choose which applied fields to study. This development has had two effects. It provides a much clearer basis for applied fields than was available in the 1940s, when the distinction between the core and applications was much less clearly defined. At the same time it unifies the subject in a specific sense. Because applied fields have increasingly been based on a common core – especially since the 1970s, when the distinction between ‘micro' and ‘macro' was significantly reduced – there is a level at which all economists can speak to each other, whatever field they specialize in. It could be said that economists speak different dialects of a shared language.
The histories of these applied fields are varied. Some fields are clearly linked to outside, political developments. In the era of the Cold War, ‘comparative economic systems' had a clear role. It owed much to the earlier ‘economics of socialism’, a field whose history went back to the nineteenth century, but it was far from identical with it. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire around 1990 and the extension of market activities in China, the capitalist system appeared, at least to most economists, to have won. Comparative economic systems, focusing on the choice between capitalism and socialism, had lost its raison d'être, even if there remained more subtle differences between different types of socialist and capitalist systems that remained to be understood. It gave way to the economics of transition and emerging markets. In contrast, the history of labour economics probably exhibits greater continuity, with problems such as wage determination and the organization of labour markets being of perennial concern. A technical field such as econometrics has no doubt emerged as a separate field because of the specialized range of mathematical techniques employed: a large investment is necessary to learn them. Though external political or ideological changes have had an impact, for example in changing the type of questions that econometricians have been expected to answer, these are probably less important in econometrics than in less technical fields of economics. Developments in information technology have probably been the main external factor influencing the recent history of econometrics, for modern computing has opened up possibilities about which early econometricians could only dream.
A significant development, especially in the 1960s and beyond, was the development of applied fields that extended the boundaries of economics. Economic analysis was applied to problems previously considered to lie in the realm of other social sciences, notably sociology and political science. Gary Becker (1930–) has applied standard price theory to, among other sociological topics, crime and the family. Criminal activity is modelled as an optimization problem in which potential criminals weigh up the gains to be obtained from successful crimes against the potential losses they would incur in the event of being caught and convicted. Given that, even if they are guilty, they are not certain to be caught and convicted, this can be formulated as a standard problem of choice under uncertainty. It is possible to use such models to decide, for example, how effective increased sentences are likely to be in deterring crime. Similar models can be used to analyse decisions within the family, such as the circumstances under which husbands or wives are more likely to go out to work, and even whether changes in economic factors will raise or lower the chances of couples deciding to marry or to divorce. These developments have led to economists becoming the butt of many jokes, such as in an article on the economics of brushing teeth which parodied Becker's method of analysis.2
Another applied field that has extended the boundaries of economics is public-choice theory. Although this field has origins that go further back, in particular to the theory of voting and Arrow's impossibility theorem, it originates with the work of Buchanan, Tullock, Downs and Olson around 1960. This applied standard economic techniques to decisions by governments and bureaucracies. Voters, politicians and bureaucrats were all assumed to be rational agents who maximized their own utility. Inability to monitor their actions perfectly and the impossibility of designing contracts that covered every eventuality gave rise to the possibility of government failure. These ideas, however, did more than add a new topic to existing courses in microeconomic theory. ‘Public choice' developed as an identifiable applied field, and in the 1970s it acquired its own scholarly society and journal. It went off in new directions. There were several reasons for this. The fact that the two most influential public-choice theorists, Buchanan and Tullock, were to the right of the political spectrum may have helped them obtain funding more easily than might otherwise have been the case. Probably more important, however, was the fact that they preferred verbal arguments to mathematical models. This set them apart from the bulk of the profession and may, at least in part, explain why they found it difficult to get their work published in the major journals. Once regular conferences, graduate programmes and specialist journals were established, it became possible for public choice to develop in ways that would not otherwise have been possible.
This type of imperialism raises difficult questions about where the boundaries of economics should be drawn. Should rational-choice sociology, which has affinities with Becker's work, be regarded as economics? Should public-choice theory be regarded as political science? In themselves, these questions are not interesting. The boundaries of academic disciplines are artificial constructions. However, the fluidity of the boundaries of modern economics echoes similar changes that have taken place over the history of the subject. For most of the period covered by this book, economics did not exist as a distinct discipline. Early chapters trace ideas about questions that we now define as ‘economic' in writings on law, philosophy and theology. Even after the subject emerged, in England, as a distinct body of ideas around the beginning of the nineteenth century, its boundaries remained very fluid. They could hardly be otherwise when the identities of ‘neighbouring' disciplines (such as psychology, sociology, geography and political science) were also not clear.
The process of differentiation continued throughout the twentieth century as new disciplines and new fields in economics emerged. The development of management science raised a fresh set of boundary questions. For example, personnel management – now clearly located in management – was at one time considered part of economics. Another example is economic history, settled uneasily on the boundaries of economics and history, with its place influenced by institutional factors as well as by intellectual developments. In the field of development, economics, politics and sociology continually confronted each other. (Hirschman described his career as involving ‘crossing boundaries' and ‘trespassing’.)3 Demography, associated with economics since Petty and Graunt, has almost dropped out of the discipline, even though it thrives. New developments such as public-choice theory and rational-choice sociology continually challenge conventional assumptions about where boundaries should be drawn.
Many of these are developments of which many other social scientists have been critical. Economists have spoken of economics as the ‘hardest' of the social sciences (on account of its use of rigorous mathematical theory, comparable with that used in physics) or as the ‘queen of the social sciences’. The response to this has been to regard economists as arrogant and imperialistic.
The last quarter of the twentieth century saw enormous homogenization within the mainstream of economic thought. When economics became professionalized towards the end of the nineteenth century, there was still great variety within the discipline. It encompassed historical economics (especially in Germany), a wide variety of interpretations of marginalism (from the mathematical approach of Walras and Fisher to the less mathematical and very different approaches of J. B. Clark and the Austrians), Veblen's evolutionary economics, and Commons's law-based institutional economics. The historian may look back and say that these were all ‘economics' in some sense, but it is hard to claim that this plethora of approaches rested on a single foundation. The differences between, for example, Fisher, Commons and Veblen were simply too great.
In the second half of the twentieth century, however, this began to change. On the basis of developments that took place during the 1930s – notably new ways of modelling individual behaviour and Keynesian macroeconomics – the range of approaches began to narrow significantly. Most noticeably, historical economics was either assimilated (it became applications of standard economics) or pushed aside into other fields, and institutionalism withered away as a significant force in the discipline. However, there was still no uniform approach to the subject. It was accepted that general-equilibrium theory – the dominant paradigm in microeconomics – could not explain everything. As a result, Keynesian macroeconomics and development economics were regarded as distinct, each being appropriate to its distinctive subject matter. Even industrial economics, centred on the structure–conduct–performance paradigm, developed as a partly autonomous, empirically driven discipline.
From the 1970s, however, with the waning of Keynesianism, this too began to change. There was a narrowing of the subject as field after field came to be based on rigorous rational-choice foundations. The mathematical level of the discipline moved up a step. For most of the profession, increasingly dominated by those trained after 1950, who took for granted the need for mathematics in economics, these changes constituted progress. Even when economists disagreed with the assumptions being made (for example, those underlying the new classical macroeconomics), most of them could accept the principle that more rigorous theorizing was essential. There were, however, minorities whose dissent remained more radical.
Some dissenting groups have a long history. Marxist economics, sustained by its political dimension, goes back to the nineteenth century. American institutionalism never completely died out. John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–), whose The Affluent Society (1958) offered a withering critique of consumerism and the role of large corporations in American society, fits into the institutionalist tradition. However, though he became president of the American Economic Association, and though his books were best-sellers, his ideas were never taken seriously by the majority of the profession. (In 1950, on the eve of what became known as the German economic miracle, he told the American Economic Association that removing price controls would wreck the German economy.) In the 1970s, however, the coalescing of economics around a central core stimulated the rise of new ‘heterodox' groupings that brought together economists who felt that their ideas were being systematically excluded from the profession's main journals. In 1973 Alfred Eichner (1937–88) and Jan Kregel (1944–) argued the case for a ‘post-Keynesian' alternative to orthodox economics. This was to integrate Eichner's theory of oligopoly pricing with Keynesian economics as interpreted in particular by Joan Robinson. She had never accepted the IS–LM interpretation of the General Theory, and in her later career she repudiated her earlier work on imperfect competition, along with neoclassical economics, as paying insufficient attention to problems of time and uncertainty. Using terminology from the historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1922–96), Eichner and Kregel argued that post-Keynesian economics offered a new paradigm for the subject: a radically new conceptual framework within which to think about economic problems.
Another dissenting movement that emerged at this time was ‘radical economics’, established after the 1968 meeting of the American Economic Association. This grew out of disillusion with the American Establishment and opposition to the Vietnam War. Radical economics had much in common with Marxist economics, in that it emphasized exploitation, discrimination and the inequalities produced by American society, and was critical of the role of the military in the American economy. However, it did not commit itself to the Marxist theoretical framework, and sought new ways to analyse these issues. Like post-Keynesian economics, it became established as an identifiable group (the Union of Radical Political Economy) within the profession.
At around the same time, ‘Austrian' economics began to coalesce into an organized, heterodox school of economics. A conference in 1974 brought together a wide-ranging group of economists, united in finding inspiration in the work of Carl Menger and his followers, in particular Mises and Hayek, who had been marginalized by post-war developments. Politically, the Austrians were conservative (in contrast with the radicals and post-Keynesians, who identified clearly with the Left), and they had considerable success in raising private funds. They emphasized methodological individualism (the doctrine that economic theories should be based on theories about individual behaviour), and they viewed individuals as economizing (making choices in response to the prices and opportunities they faced). However, like Menger, they refused to model this using mathematics, preferring to rely on verbal logic. They took up Hayek's view, which had dropped out of orthodox economics, of competition as a dynamic process – a discovery procedure – viewing the market as a means for disseminating information in a changing, uncertain world.
One of the main reasons why heterodox groups began to organize was the perceived trend towards greater homogeneity of the mainstream. In an environment where academic economists were under continual pressure to publish, economists with unorthodox views felt threatened, and organization was important for their survival. That they were able to organize was a result of the profession having become sufficiently large that it could accommodate dissenting groups. Dissenters were not spread uniformly across universities, but relied on particular institutions for support. Chicago (with Friedman, George Stigler (1911–91), Becker and Lucas) was the centre of orthodox free-market economics, and Yale, Harvard and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) were the centres of orthodox Keynesianism. Public-choice theory (close to being heterodox, though not quite deserving of the label) was centred in Virginia, and Austrian economics in the New York and Auburn universities. The variety of the American university system was vital.
At the same time as self-styled heterodox economists were trying to break loose from what they saw as the stranglehold of an increasingly entrenched orthodoxy, that orthodoxy began to change. New concepts and new techniques were developed, and these enabled economists to tackle problems that had previously been considered beyond formal economic analysis. Many of these developments are too recent for it to be possible to assess their long-term significance in any detail, but it is nonetheless important to consider them. They illustrate the great variety of ways in which the boundaries of economics are being extended. More important, they show how strands in what is considered mainstream or orthodox economics have abandoned what were previously considered to be central elements in orthodox theory. For example, at one time it would have been said that orthodox ‘neoclassical' economics assumed perfect information. However, from the 1960s even Chicago economists – notably Stigler – began to work with theories in which agents had only imperfect or limited information about their environment. These developments explain why it is that many economists fail to recognize the picture painted by ‘heterodox' economists of a discipline dominated by a monolithic orthodoxy.
The first example is the set of developments centred on the concept of transaction costs. Transaction costs are the costs of transferring ownership from one person to another. They arise for many reasons:
The parties to a contract have to find each other, they have to communicate and to exchange information. The goods must be described, inspected, weighed and measured. Contracts must be drawn up, lawyers may be consulted, title is transferred and records have to be kept. In some cases, compliance needs to be enforced through legal action and breach of contract may lead to litigation.4
The term ‘transaction cost' was first used by Marschak in 1950, but the idea has a long history. Economists frequently referred to ‘frictions’, and used the metaphor of money being the oil that reduces such frictions. In the 1920s Commons argued that transactions (which he defined very broadly, to include much more than the exchange of goods and services) should form the focus of economists' attention. In 1937 Coase argued that transaction costs could explain the existence and size of firms. Coase pointed out that activities could be organized in two ways. One is through the market. The other is by management within a firm. Both methods involve transaction costs, but the costs are different. He then argued that the boundary of the firm – the dividing line between activities organized managerially and those that are organized through the market – should be the one that minimizes transaction costs. In other words, transaction costs explain why firms should exist (why some transactions are undertaken outside the market) and why the economy is not organized as one giant firm (a centrally planned economy). It was not until around 1970 that economists began to see the significance of Coase's idea. Oliver Williamson (1932–) and others began to find ways to make the idea of transaction costs operational. They used it to answer questions such as why certain industries are vertically integrated (the same firms control the supply of materials, production and distribution) whereas others are not.
The significance of this idea was that it offered an alternative to the conventional theory of the firm. The traditional view saw the firm as a technical unit for transforming inputs into outputs. Its size was determined by technology – steel firms are large because production costs are lower for larger firms than for smaller ones, whereas greengrocers can be small because small shops can be as efficient as large ones. Coase, instead, saw the firm as an organization or, as Williamson put it, as a governance structure. This is, of course, obvious. However, it was not until Coase introduced the idea of transaction costs that economists had any way in which to analyse this. Many economists had studied the organization of industry (a classic example is Marshall's Industry and Trade, 1919), but such work was largely descriptive. Economists had not found a theoretical framework that could explain why industries were organized as they were. ‘Industrial organization' existed as a field within economics, and courses were taught, but they focused on problems such as monopoly, regulation and anti-trust laws. They took the way industry was organized as a datum.
As reinterpreted by Coase, Williamson and others, the theory of the firm becomes a theory about the efficiency of different types of contract. This is an example of a much broader problem – the economic analysis of the law. This field – usually known as ‘law and economics' – began to develop in its modern form in the mid-1960s. A 1960 article by Coase on social cost5 argued that the establishing of property rights (a legal question) was crucial to any efficient solution of externality problems. He analysed how the courts in Britain and the United States had tackled the problem, claiming that the way in which judges had interpreted phrases such as ‘reasonable' and ‘common or ordinary use' frequently reflected economic considerations. Property rights were also analysed by Armen Alchian (1914– ) and Harold Demsetz (1930– ). Another dimension was provided by work on torts, such as that by Guido Calabresi (1932–). Though it remained distinct, this work fitted well with the emerging field of public-choice theory.
Although it provoked much empirical research, the concept of transaction cost was a theoretical innovation – a new way of thinking about economic phenomena. In contrast, experimental economics involved the creation of a new empirical procedure whereby economic theories could be tested. Like the concept of transaction costs, it has a long history. Psychologists have always used experiments to establish and test theories about behaviour, and economists followed suit. The modern literature on the subject dates from the 1930s and 1940s, and the early work addressed several types of problem. The earliest was the use of experiments to determine consumers' preference. In 1931 L. L. Thurstone (1887–1955) did this by asking subjects, repeatedly, to choose between alternative bundles of goods. This was strongly criticized (subjects were not making real choices), but in the early 1950s other economists continued this type of study. A second type of work was the use of experiments to find out how markets operated. In 1948 Chamberlin constructed an experiment to find out whether a group of subjects would hit on the competitive-equilibrium price at which supply equalled demand.
Interest in both types of experiment increased significantly after the publication of von Neumann and Morgenstern's 1944 book on game theory (see p. 263). During the 1950s and 1960s, however – even though some influential results were discovered, and systematic attention began to be paid to questions of how experiments should be conducted experimental economics remained small-scale. In the 1970s the subject attracted more funding, including support from the National Science Foundation in the USA, and it grew rapidly. By the end of the 1980s it had become a generally recognized (if still controversial) way to do research in economics, and by the end of the 1990s it had entered the mainstream, in that it was discussed in introductory textbooks. It had ceased to be an activity undertaken only by specialists.
The significance of experimental economics is twofold. It provides a way to test economic theories in a manner that had previously been thought impossible. Unfortunately, as far as many economists are concerned, it suggests that some of the fundamental assumptions made by economists, such as utility maximization, are probably false. Experimental evidence suggests that people do not behave as they would if they were maximizing utility. Some economists have responded by developing theories of decision-making that reconcile experimental results with utility maximization. Others simply ignore such results, sometimes expressing scepticism about whether the artificial conditions of the laboratory (often involving students playing abstract games of chance to earn small sums of money) reflect real-world situations.
Experimental economics has also provided a way to try out alternative ideas about how institutions should be designed. For example, much work has been undertaken on auctions. When it was suggested that the winners of competitive tenders for oilfields systematically earned low returns, experiments were able to confirm the phenomenon of the ‘winner's curse’. The idea behind this is that, if firms are bidding for oil rights or some other asset whose value is unknown, the winner will typically be someone who has overestimated the asset's value. This provides bidders with an incentive to be cautious in their bids. This is the rationale for awarding contracts to the second-highest bidder: knowing that a bid will be successful only if one other bidder is willing to pay more makes it safer to put in a high bid. Auction design has been an area where experiments have proved useful in testing ideas that economic theorists have produced.
Experimental economics requires organization and resources. (It is now generally considered that real money has to change hands if experimental subjects are to behave as they would in real life.) The establishing of the field in the 1980s and 1990s is therefore to be explained in terms of the sociology of the profession. However, there is in principle no reason why it could not have emerged much earlier had economists been less suspicious of such work.
In contrast, modern econometric methods would have been impossible without recent technological developments. The availability of cheap, powerful computers has been crucial to the transformation of the statistical techniques available to economists. Many of the estimation methods and statistical tests that have proliferated in the past twenty years would have been inconceivable without modern computers.
The use of computers has also produced data that would have been impossible to imagine even ten years ago. For example, the computerization of trading in financial markets means that it is possible to monitor stock prices and individual transactions minute by minute. The result is data sets that contain enough information to study the detailed operation of these markets, such as the way in which news affects prices. The use of new econometric techniques and the availability of large data sets have transformed empirical research in this area. Similarly, computers have made it possible for labour economists to study samples of thousands of individuals. Using such large data sets, economists can calculate things such as the effect on employment of a change in unemployment benefits while controlling for the effects of differences in personal characteristics (gender, education, health and employment history, and so on).
In 1912, Schumpeter summarized contemporary developments in economics in the following words:
The more we approach modern times the less possible it becomes to characterize briefly the wealth of currents and cross-currents and the more untrue, forced and misleading appears any systematic arrangement and grouping… We must add that hand in hand with the progressing specialization resulting from the increase of the subject-matter and from the advances in analysis, which turned many of the best workers into laymen in all branches except their own special ones, a tendency established itself in most recent times to break down the barriers between the various specialized branches.6
Though written nearly a century ago, these words sum up many of the themes discussed in the last five or six chapters of this book. Economics, especially since the middle of the twentieth century, has become much larger. The number of economists has increased, as have the range of fields covered by the discipline and the amount to be learned about each. In this book, order was imposed by picking out certain very broad themes, from the rise of mathematical economics and econometrics to the expanded role played by economists in advising governments. However, although a sometimes-bewildering variety of ideas is discussed, even more has been left out. Schumpeter's judgement that as we approach modern times it becomes less possible to offer a brief characterization of the subject remains well justified.
When we turn to Schumpeter's vision of the structure of the discipline, the picture is much more complicated. He wrote at a time when the institution of the academic school, based in a particular institution and often dominated by a single individual (Schmoller and Marshall being the best examples in economics), was at its zenith. Such groupings were, he argued, becoming less important:
The slogans used to designate certain outstanding groups are much simpler than is warranted by the actual conditions. These slogans, moreover, are partly coloured by non-scientific factors… [T]hey appear with a claim to universal validity, while in fact in every branch of the social sciences, and often with different problems in the same branch, conditions are different.7
In other words, the slogans about historical and theoretical methods were oversimplified. People had to use different methods alongside each other, with the result that barriers between different specializations were breaking down.
However, although the academic school as Schumpeter had known it was coming to an end, the division of the subject into schools of thought continued. During the inter-war period, American economics exhibited a variety of approaches, loosely covered by the extremely oversimplified labels of ‘institutionalism' (notably Commons, Mitchell and Veblen) and ‘neoclassical economics' (of which J. B. Clark and Fisher were the most eminent representatives). In Britain there was the divide between the Cambridge school (continued by Pigou and Keynes) and LSE (where Robbins and Hayek had displaced the historical approach of the Webbs).
In the post-war period, schools continued, their character changing yet again. The neoclassical synthesis of Keynesian economics and general-equilibrium theory developed into the dominant orthodoxy. Self-consciously heterodox schools (such as Austrians and post-Keynesians) formed in rebellion against this. These, however, remained numerically small and marginal to the discipline. More important was the emergence of new approaches to the subject from within the mainstream. These approaches shared much with the prevailing view, but pursued different, controversial, lines of inquiry, with the result that labels such as ‘orthodox' or ‘heterodox' were hard to apply. Examples include Friedman's ‘monetarism’ and the Chicago school – resolutely ‘neoclassical' and yet challenging the consensus – public-choice theory, transaction-cost economics and so on.
In the late nineteenth century, schools were associated with hierarchical university systems and a lack of international communication and publication opportunities. In contrast, a century later, schools were made possible by easy communications and the burgeoning variety of outlets for economic research. Present-day schools may be dominated by the work of certain individuals, but this is usually because those individuals' ideas have stimulated others to emulate them. Schools are more diffuse and more fluid than a century earlier, for they comprise networks of like-minded economists who do not necessarily share any institutional ties other than choosing to publish in certain places and to join certain societies. The boundaries and significance of schools change as some ideas become common currency and others become unfashionable.
Similar remarks can be made about applied fields. On one hand, the growth of the discipline has increased the barriers between fields (as Schumpeter perceived). For example, it is difficult for a single economist to be familiar, in detail, with the latest developments in more than one or two fields. This effect has been reinforced by the emergence of specialized journals and conferences, which make it much easier to be unaware of what is happening in other fields. On the other hand, there are forces operating to reduce these barriers. The emergence of a common core of economic theory has served to unify fields. It is possible to be an expert in a particular set of techniques and to apply these in a variety of fields. This means that a theorist who works on models of imperfect competition may write articles on industrial organization, macroeconomics and international trade. Whereas, for previous generations, ‘macro' and ‘micro' were very separate disciplines, the barrier between them became much lower during the 1980s and 1990s.
Schumpeter had hoped that the ‘non-scientific factors' behind the slogans of various groups would diminish, that economists would stop making excessive claims for their ideas. It seems safe to say that this has not happened. General-equilibrium theory and then game theory have both held out hopes of providing the organizing framework within which disputes might be clarified and resolved. However, while some disputes have been resolved, new ones have emerged and old ones have re-emerged. Econometrics has made enormous advances, but its power to settle theoretical disputes arguably remains extremely controversial. Schumpeter's hope of developing scientific economic techniques that would render economics uncontroversial remains a chimera. On top of this, the increased competitiveness of the academic system provides people with an incentive to oversell their ideas – to claim excessive originality. To achieve tenure in an American university typically requires publication of half a dozen articles, and few economists can expect to have this many genuinely original ideas by their late twenties. Once past this barrier, promotion and salary depend on regular publication, and reputations are made by claiming much, not by being modest. The founder of a controversial school will be rewarded by frequent citations of his or her work, and high citation counts are taken as a measure of prestige. Ending a controversy does not produce many citations. On top of this, politics and ideology intrude as much as ever.