Arnold Kling on Trusting Scholarship and Peer Review

A terrific comment by Arnold Kling on when to trust the findings of an economics paper. Of particular interest is the last paragraph, which discusses peer review:

I put no special value in peer review. You can have a peer who discards a paper for purely idiosyncratic reasons, or because he just does not understand key aspects of the paper. More often, you have a peer who approves a paper because it cites his own work favorably, which makes it immune to criticism in the eyes of the reviewer.

Right on, Arnold!

I am shocked by how many economists put their faith in the peer review system. Do they not understand the incentives that reviewers face? Or do they think that reviews should not and will not act in their own self-interest? If it is the latter, they really need to re-read The Logic of Collective Action. There are a lot of 'brilliant' economists out there that are expert math wizards but seem to know very little actual economics.

Mind you I may just have had a bad peer review experience. But most of the peer reviews I've seen tend to be as I describe here:

The peer review process I've experienced it is as follows: Paper gets sent to editor (who is typically a fully tenured econ prof somewhere). Editor leaves the paper sitting on his desk for six months. Editor then sends the paper to a Ph.D. student, often one that possesses a limited command of the English language, and gives him three days to finish a review, since it needs to be returned. Grad student reviewer spends as little time possible reviewing the paper (since he doesn't get paid anything extra for the task) so he can get back to his thesis. The fact that Blinder's arguments lack legitimacy to economists because they didn't go through this process says far more about the economics profession than it does about Alan Blinder.

I am not sure if Arnold Kling has changed or I have changed but I find myself agreeing with almost every single thing he has written lately.