How Economics is lucky

The RePEc blog has a post about a ranking of worldwide repositories. RePEc touts its #2 ranking, and rightfully so. One thing we need to realize is how lucky we are in Economics to be so well organized.

Imagine: we have a well structured job markets for PhDs, with a central job lising and centralized interviews during the ASSA meetings. Some other sciences have nothing like that and graduates struggle to even know what jobs are out there. We have academic departments that take recruiting seriously and that do relatively little inbreeding (with the exception of Harvard-MIT cross-hires that often look suspicious). We have a publishing process that is ultra-competitive and uncompromising. And finally, we have an organized pre-prints culture that is unusually well organized, as the Webometrics rankings of world repositories highlights.

Just look at the field specific repositories that are ranked:

• #1 Physics and Mathematics
  
• #2 Economics (RePEc)
  
• #3 Library Science
  
• #16 Biology
  
• #18 Arts and Humanities
  
• #37 Economics, Law and Management (SSRN)
  
• #39 Information Science
  
• #43 Cognitive Science
  
• #54 Philosophy of Science
  
• #56 Economics (MPRA)
  
• #60 Earth Systems
  

I say this is very impressive.

PS: The light link of the day: the video sent to those admitted in the Harvard Economics program in 2006.