A Spanish historian against Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Laia Balcells
It is hard to find a professional group more arrogant and ignorant than economists, but it is impossible to find a more arrogant and ignorant scholar than an economist doing history or sociology. In the same way, there is no more astonishing success of mediocrity than the book Why nations fail, a recollection of classic topics with an outdated approach discussed by historians in the last forty years. However, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, as new academic starlets, are popularizing their simplicities and making school among American universities so concerned with being popular as all the American society.
This pursuit of success in the middle of tough competence forces these scholars to dishonesty and to promote junk papers written with a lot of tables and mathematical formulas to avoid the hard work of research in archives or read about the subject. Publish or perish and if you are an economist you can write articles without reading books (reading books is a waste of time, a competitive disadvantage). In the past, I have denounced the academic dishonesty of these scholars for the Spanish audience, but today I have found a post in the blog of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson related to the nation building process in Spain that quotes the Dr. Laia Balcells. I had a controversy with Laia Balcells as a consequence of her intellectual dishonesty, but I understand that people with a doctorate from Yale are always right. Really, they are the right people.
However, what has been intolerant for me again is the plagiarism or the obvious ignorance of Laia Balcells. In the post, Acemoglu and Robinson attribute the known thesis of Miroslav Hroch to Laia Balcells. Obviously, Acemoglu and Robinson don’t know who is Hroch, because he is a historian and he is not American, but they can write as authorities about all the subjects quoting friends who quote them as authorities. This is the way of doing science of the economists. Please, stop this now. Historians, rise up and denounce their cheap and prefabricated knowledge.
We, Spanish historians, have had an intense debate about the nation building process. My colleagues Fernando Molina and Miguel Cabo have important papers in English about this subject, international academic publications of reference for thoughtful and honest researchers. Even in my small and average university I read Miroslav Hroch when I was an undergrad student. Besides, we translated Miroslav Hroch for the Spanish audience. But, you know, there is only crap science in the small European universities. We need to hire more people with a doctorate from the Ivy League. They really know how to being competitive: make right friends and say right things.
Note: In the original article, Laia Balcells quotes correctly Miroslav Hroch, but Acemoglu and Robinson forget him and praise her for Hroch’s theories. This is the classical way of working of invisible colleges: 1) ignore, neglect or hide all the scholars who are outside the top circles of influence, because they can not give you anything of value. 2) Display the members of elite academic centers as a community of independent researchers without personal connections or conflicts of interest. Actually they are a small group bound by a thick net of personal ties and favours. 3) Highlight, praise and quote all things that the members of top academic circles do, because you also are a member of this circle. 4) Never be so accurate or rigorous as to contradict one of this rules.
It is strange to understand how Acemoglu and Robinson do this mistake and why Laia Balcells does not alert them about the original father of these ideas. Anyway, the article of Laia Balcells is a superficial and fast approach to a subject outside her field of speciality plenty of huge mistakes as usual. She uses an outdated bibliography and forget to quote the scholars who are doing research about this issue, probably, because they are Spanish historians without connections.
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