What Is Good Research?

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A lot of referees from mainly I guess the identification mafia, we're just completely ignoring the big question. Good research is research that significantly changed your prior's about an important topic. And you would have a paper that doesn't do a very careful identification, but still the combination of data and logical arguments makes a significant change of once prior beliefs in political science. The other was really the hostility now we didn't see many of them in the seminars, because if you're hostile you typically hide it in a seminar to a large extent,. But an anonymous referee could go full. So, I think most of the really hostile referees were actually not economists.

Since at least Adam Smith, the common wisdom has been that the transition from hunter-gathering to farming allowed the creation of the State. Farming, so went the theory, led to agricultural surplus, and that surplus is the prerequisite for taxation and a State. But economist Omer Moav of the University of Warwick and Reichman University argues that it wasn't farming but the farming of a particular kind of crop (but not others) that led to hierarchy and the State. Moav explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts storability is the key dimension that allows for taxation and a State. The conversation includes a discussion of why it's important to understand the past and the challenges of confirming or refuting theories about history.