me versus the scatterplots

"voices from the beehive", part 1

“Not so much a bonnet, more a sort of wearable beehive”, is how one former colleague reacted to my suggesting that I had a bee in my bonnet about something or other. Now that the holidays are over and I’m getting back to Friday short posts, I thought I would initiate a series on topics linked only by the theme that they’ve been bugging me for a while.

This week - economic geography. I probably shouldn’t write off entire fields of enquiry en bloc; even lab-based experimental economics probably has some things in it which generated reproducible results. But econ-geog really seems to me to generate a lot of amazingly simplistic takes, usually involving the creation of scatterplots.

I could bore on at length on this subject - particularly when those scatterplots have city size on one axis and productivity on another, and are being used to try to support some inference beyond that of “if something grows a lot then it will get bigger”. But that wouldn’t be fair to you the readers. As well as being tedious, it would be unfair of me to give the impression that I was susceptible to rational debate on something like this; it isn’t an argument, it’s a bee in my bonnet.

So instead, I’ll just make this observation. If someone claims that they have found the single universal formula which determines success for all companies everywhere, regardless of their size, location, history or industry, then we correctly laugh at them, call them a charlatan and relegate their books to the “Guru Of The Month Club” section of the shop.

But when someone comes along doing the same thing for cities and regions, we seem much more inclined to take them seriously and publish special editions of economic geography journals discussing their international comparative evidence. It’s weird, and in my view the root of the problem is accounting as a mental prison. In economics, we’ve taken on a model of argument in which data, regressions and modelling (which are then summarised on a scatterplot) are the standard of proof. And because of this, we’ve closed off all possible explanations of regional and national economic success and failure except those for which usable datasets can be found.