While I was still among the potsherds, Greg Mankiw triggered a remarkable discussion about the place of economics in academia. The kickoff was a note from a grad student having some doubts about his commitment to the field. "I sat through a whole day of paper presentations and the one thing that struck me was how incredibly technical, narrow and to a some extent pointless, some of the research was," says the student. "I'm left wondering if nowadays to be successful in a PhD program I must enjoy doing something very narrow and technical even though it might be bordering on real world irrelevance. I hope I am wrong."
Mankiw's response: pretty much "guilty as charged, your honor." The ripe fruit has been picked. The stock of ideas is large, but the flow of good new ideas is small. And perhaps most remarkable at all--after his first econ course (as a freshman at Princeton), he has never really had so much fun again.
The comments are also interesting, not least because just about no one presumes to challenge the core proposition. Students, teachers, sympathetic observers: they pretty much all agree thast academic econ has reached some kind of dead end.
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