PUBLISHING AS PROSTITUTION?

Via Bryan Caplan of the Armchair Economist mailing list:

http://www.iew.unizh.ch/wp/iewwp117.pdf

Institute for Empirical Research in Economics
University of Zurich
Working Paper Series
ISSN 1424-0459
Working Paper No. 117
PUBLISHING AS PROSTITUTION?
Choosing Between One‘s Own Ideas and Academic Failure
Bruno S. Frey
June 2002
1
PUBLISHING AS PROSTITUTION?
Choosing Between
One’s Own Ideas
and
Academic Failure
by
Bruno S. Frey*
(University of Zurich)
(revised version of June 6, 2002)
* Bruno S. Frey is Professor of Economics, Institute for Empirical Economic Research, Bluemlisalpstr. 10, CH-
8006 Zurich, Switzerland. bsfrey@iew.unizh.ch. www.bsfrey.ch. Comments are most welcome.
I am grateful for helpful comments from Matthias Benz, Egon Franck, Robert Frank, René L. Frey, Daniel
Hamermesh, Reto Jegen, Simon Luechinger, Margit Osterloh, Stephan Meier and Hannelore Weck-Hannemann
2
Abstract
Survival in academia depends on publications in refereed journals. Authors only get their papers accepted if they intellectually prostitute themselves by slavishly following the demands made by anonymous referees without property rights on the journals they advise. Intellectual prostitution is neither beneficial to suppliers nor consumers. But it is avoidable. The editor (with property rights on the journal) should make the basic decision of whether a paper is worth publishing or not. The referees only give suggestions on how to improve thepaper. The author may disregard this advice. This reduces intellectual prostitution and produces more original publications.
JEL classification: A11, Z00
Keywords: academic market, publications, economics of economics, intellectual prostitution
3
I. Prostitution of Ideas and Academic Career
This paper will never be published in a (refereed) economics journal, nor will it be submitted
to a scholarly journal.

Why have women become left-wing: the political gender gap and the decline in marriage

So this is why lefties get all most of the babes...:>

http://www.columbia.edu/~le93/qje_all.pdf

"Why have women become left-wing: the political gender gap and the decline in marriage" with Rohini Pande)
Accepted Quarterly Journal of Economics. Featured in Economic Intuition, fall 2001; and Business Week, March 11, 2002

Paper
Abstract: The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap -- higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men but not women. Second, longitudinal data show that following marriage (divorce), women are less (more) likely to support the Democratic party.

Little Jimmy was born without a head.

I was a founding member of WIT. (Though don't judge the current group by my improv skills now--I haven't done it in a long time.)

I highly recommend their classes for any of y'all in the Washington, D.C. area.
Here's the announcement:

Little Jimmy was born without a head.

This is a very rare affliction (commonly referred to as Little
Jimmy's Syndrome) that strikes only one individual every sixty or
seventy years, and Jimmy needs your help by June 24th.

( How you can help Jimmy )

A spoonful of...

Ladies, the doctor is in.

(Thanks to klarfax for the link.)

Pleasure Systems in the Brain

http://wings.buffalo.edu/aru/ARUreport01.htm

From M.A. Bozarth (1994). Pleasure systems in the brain. In D.M. Warburton (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality (pp. 5-14 + refs). New York: John Wiley & Sons. (Note: Minor typographical errors appearing in the published version have been corrected.)

Pleasure Systems in the Brain
Michael A. Bozarth
Behavioral Neuroscience Program
Department of Psychology
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo, New York 14260-4110 USA
Neurological research has identified a biological mechanism mediating behavior motivated by events commonly associated with pleasure in humans. These events are termed "rewards" and are viewed as primary factors governing normal behavior. The subjective impact of rewards (e.g., pleasure) can be considered essential (e.g., Young, 1959) or irrelevant (e.g., Skinner, 1953) to their effect on behavior, but the motivational effect of rewards on behavior is universally acknowledged by experimental psychologists.

Motivation & Reward
Motivation can be considered under two general rubrics—appetitive and aversive motivation. Appetitive motivation concerns behavior directed toward goals that are usually associated with positive hedonic processes; food, sex, and wine are three such goal objects. Aversive motivation involves escaping from some hedonically unpleasant condition; the pain from a headache, the chill from a cold winter night are among the list of conditions that give rise to aversive motivation. The notion that hedonic mechanisms might provide direction to behavior can be traced at least to the Greeks (e.g., Epicures); Spencer (1880) formalized this notion into psychological theory and suggested that two fundamental forces governed motivation--pleasure and pain. Troland (1928) suggested that pleasure was associated with beneception, events that contributed to the survival of the organism (or species) and thus 'benefited' the organism from an evolutionary biology perspective; pain was suggested to be associated with nociception, events that had undesirable consequences for the organism. This schema—emphasizing hedonic processes in the regulation of behavior—lost favor with the advance of the Freudian and later behavioristic schools, although variations on this theme have occasionally resurfaced among motivational psychologists (e.g., Bindra, 1969; Young, 1959).
Behaviorism traditionally rejects the notion that subjective experience has a critical role in determining behavior. Specifically, behaviorism describes the relationship between behavior and external factors governing that behavior without reference to internal states, albeit it does help to have a hungry (i.e., food deprived) rat when studying the ability of food to serve as a reward. Behaviorism, or more properly operant conditioning theory, postulates three fundamental principles of behavior—positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, and punishment. Positive reinforcement describes the situation where presentation of some stimulus event (e.g., food) increases the probability or frequency of the behavior it follows. Negative reinforcement describes the situation where the termination of some stimulus event (e.g., electric shock) increases the probability or frequency of the behavior its termination follows. Both positive and negative reinforcers increase behavioral responses; they differ in the temporal relationship between the behavior and the reinforcing event—positive reinforcers follow the behavior they reinforce, while negative reinforcers precede the behavior they reinforcement. (In colloquial terms, the organism is said to work to receive a positive reinforcer and to work to escape from a negative reinforcer.) Punishment is the third general principle of operant conditioning. Punishment describes the situation where presentation of an aversive stimulus following a behavior decreases the probability or frequency of that behavior. Unlike reinforcers, punishers suppress behavior. Radical behaviorism describes the effects of reinforcement and punishment on behavior devoid of their subjective impact. Indeed, the emotional states associated with reinforcement and punishment are usually viewed as the result of behavioral conditioning and not a cause of behavior.

In general, events that serve as positive reinforcers produce approach behavior defined as appetitive motivation. Events that serve as negative reinforcers or punishers produce withdrawal behavior defined as aversive motivation. Positive reinforcement is usually associated with a pleasant hedonic impact (and hence frequently termed reward connoting this pleasant affective component), while negative reinforcement and punishment are usually associated with an unpleasant hedonic impact. Whether the subjective experience of reward (viz., pleasure) plays an important role in determining behavior is moot for the present discussion. The same principles apply whether the emotional impact of a reward precedes or follows the behavioral response. Furthermore, events that serve as positive reinforcers in humans and other animals are generally described by humans as pleasant; thus, there is an intimate association between reward and pleasure despite controversy regarding the role of the subjective experience of pleasure in determining behavior.

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