Historia versus Economía

Un académico contra el imperialismo económico

CEACS Juan MarchConsensoEconomía neoclásicaEducaciónEpistemologíaHistoria EconómicaIntegridad

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is no more astonishing success of mediocrity than the book Why nations fail, a recollection of classic topics with an outdated approach discussed by historians in the last forty years.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.

SIRERA MIRALLES

Carles Sirera Miralles (València, 1981) is a Spanish historian and adjunct professor in the University of Valencia. His principal lines of research focused on the problems of the democratization in Europe, especially during the end of Nineteenth Century and the beginnings of the Twentieth Century. As social historian, he has wrote about the sports and sociability and his thesis, Un título para las clases medias, is one of the most completed and relevant studies on the subject of the secondary school in Spain. His intellectual influences are the Alltagsgeschichte school, Norbert Elias, Fritz K. Ringer and all historians who, although the limitations of our discipline, think that is possible reach some kind of valid, useful and interesting knowledge.

One thought on “A Spanish historian against Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Laia Balcells

  • Desde el oficialismo tambin dej claras sus aspiraciones el gobernador de la nortea provincia delaware Main course Ros, Sergio Urribarri, not todava desconocido para chicago opinin pblica, quien anunci cual competir dentro de las prximas elecciones Primarias, Abiertas y simply Simultneas como paso previo a new su candidatura presidencial.
    [url=http://www.locchiodelciclone.it/]Borse Givenchy[/url]
    Borse Givenchy

Comments are closed.