Yellow Mellow

Honestly, that Harvard acceptance was probably bullshit. Interesting choice @pentimentos! Sarah Lewis seems quite young. Where else did you apply? If you do not get into Harvard this year, do consider other programs that might be as good if not better than Harvard for this particular interest (NYU with Edward Sullivan, Berkeley with Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby).

Well, what about if you try this: do not post any more books. Simply explain to us, in clear terms, which development programs now, or which development economists who are widely recognized within the academic community, fall into the mistakes that you attribute to the field since the 80s.

If you have a background on economics as you claim, perhaps you could profit from reading this by Duflo and Kremer (two of the really top names in development now) https://economics.mit.edu/files/765 It discusses how randomized controls can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of policies, a movement that was in its infancy at the time of the paper and that has become hegemonic right now. Honestly, I think no one is criticizing you for failing to share your credentials with us. Rather, we have an issue with the content of your comments. The issue is that you argue that the field of development economics has had "minimal changes" since the 80s, which is simply untrue. The move towards randomized trials, the focus on human capital, and the embrace of small-scale projects is an incredibly significant and well-documented shift that has deeply affected the profession in recent years. Yes, Stigliz has produced very important work on markets with imperfect information. What is your point? He has also celebrated the move towards randomization and the work of development economists now, as recently as in his 2015 report on the state of the American economy.

Interesting that so many of the French ones are medievalists (Bloch, Le Goff, Duby, Le Roy Laurie, and you could add Aries). What is it about the study of the Middle Ages in France that routinely produces the most creative and influential historians?

I found your comment very useful, but I am not convinced that this is the case. Think about Emily Oster's paper on witchcraft. Her question is, quite simply, why the persecution of witches emerged in early modern Europe. This is a question that many historians have pondered and have tried to answer with different methods. I think Imenol's point remains valid: there are situations when both historians and economists try to answer the same question in radically different ways, and it might behoove us to wonder which method might be best under which conditions. On the other hand, I was also surprised by your comment regarding p values' lack of relation to causality. It is my understanding that p values do have to do with causality, even if they are not a proof of causality. A p value below a certain level means that the null hypothesis can be rejected (the hypothesis that your proposition is untrue). Therefore, isn't it a way to estimate if your proposition is true (for instance, if a particular variable has a significant effect on an outcome?

May I ask what is it that you like about Eliade? I have never read him but one of my professors (a very prestigious scholar, Macarthur Fellow and all) described him as an extremely pernicious influence on his field, one that had not contributed to but rather slowed down the advancement of knowledge (he is an anthropologist, with a focus on Pre-Columbian societies). Honestly, I have never read him so I don't know what the fuzz is all about. Could you tell me what you found inspiring, and why you think he has fallen out of favor?

I might be mistaken, but I do not recall any evidence aside from this: "I researched about fifty history PhD programs in the past year when I was considering pursuing a doctorate, and the vast majority of the programs had at least one faculty member with a Wisconsin PhD." I gave the example of Princeton, which is the case I know best. Princeton has only one Wisconsin PhD who happens to be a spousal hire. On the other hand, Princeton has a significant number of professors who got their PhDs at the other institutions to which Wisconsin was compared in a previous post, namely Columbia (Rustow, Divya Cherian, Wheatley, Philip Nord...) or Harvard (He Bian, Hubbard, Goldin, Xin Guen, Guenther, Karl) and there are others, these are just the ones that come from the top of my head. It baffles me that you characterize your anecdotes as "evidentiary support." To say that you have researched "at least fifty programs" and that the vast majority had someone from Wisconsin does not mean anything: which programs? how many people? My argument was about the relative value of Wisconsin vis-a-vis other institutions. I never claimed that the program would disqualify you from a job, obviously. I find psstein last comment sensitive and I agree that the conversation is not very productive. Bottom line: you should go to a place with an advisor that fits with your interests, but there is definitively a difference in the status of a program like Wisconsin's and one like Harvard's, which is manifest not only in abstract things such as name recognition but also on hard placement data.

You would be surprised about what people expect from medievalists these days... postcolonial stuff is actually growing in the field, and there are tons of conferences and edited collection on "The Postcolonial Middle Ages" and things of the sort.

You are right in that there is no point in debating the issue further. On the other hand, I still cannot see how I failed to respect the people that I have engaged with during the discussion. I simply believe that the placement record does not lie, and that although one should not go to Columbia, Harvard, or Princeton if they are not a good fit, the fact remains that those colleges have much better placement records across different fields than Wisconsin. Of course, there will always be exceptions and extraordinary professors everywhere, but I think that it is important to recognize general trends and not simply to shrug them off by saying that "everything depends on your particular case."

You seem to forget that I was replying to a comment by psstein which in fact identified those that were, in his opinion, the best programs in the history of science (medieval subfield): Wisconsin and "probably" Harvard. It is of course true that, to a certain extent, there is no top program that can be decided in abstraction from someone's individual interests. But, if we are forced to do so, it is simply misleading to identify Wisconsin as the best one.

I am currently reading a bunch of very interesting books on the environment and science: Bill Cronon's Nature's Metropolis, Pablo Gomez's The Experiential Caribbean, and the more general Science and Civil Society, by Lynn Nyhart. Truly great books by very interesting scholars!

Does NYU have the best program in French literature in the US? Please discuss

All that is true, but you forget something that is crucial for me -Princeton is close to New York, so close that some of us decide to live there and commute after the third year. Otherwise, you are still a bus ride away from an environment that is, to be honest, much more to the taste of a Western European than Madison. I am simply baffled as to why my posts seem to be so offensive to so many I have simply expressed a view regarding Wisconsin's status that differs from those of others. I have not offended anyone while doing so.

I guess we might simply have different standards or different understandings of what a "top" program is. I was replying to an user that placed Wisconsin at the same level as Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, and Princeton. In the latter, which is obviously the program I am most familiar with, I am not aware of any professor with a PhD from Wisconsin, yet I could mention from the top of my head several professors with PhDs from each of the three other institutions. Look, if people want to apply to Wisconsin so be it -there certainly are worse programs. Perhaps my situation is different because I am an international student who was offered funding at my home institution, so I would only leave my Europe aux ancient parapets for a really good (actually top) American university, preferably one that is not in the middle of nowhere.

Of course. My point is simply that it is not a top program at the level of Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia (the programs to which it was being compared in the post to which I responded). Simply look at the placement record. It is just dishonest to suggest otherwise. Cronon is very good. He is an anomaly in Wisconsin though. If he has not moved to a better place it is simply out of a geographical preference (Anthony Grafton implied something of the sort in an AHA meeting if I recall correctly...)