Economics Job Market Rumors is a website that's half a job information Wiki, where people post about what's going on inside economics departments, and half a discussion forum, where anyone with an internet connection can ask the economics hive mind whatever they want. All anonymously. People can talk about finding work, share rumors, and just blow off steam. And that steam can get scaldingly hot. The forum has become notorious for racist and sexist posts, often attacking specific women and people from marginalized backgrounds. Last year, economist Florian Ederer and engineer Kyle Jensen discovered a flaw in the way the site gave anonymity to its users. The flaw made it possible to identify which universities and institutions were the sources of many of the toxic posts on the site. And helped answer a longstanding question that's dogged the economics profession: was the toxicity on EJMR the work of a bunch of fringey internet trolls, or was it a symptom of a much deeper problem within economics itself? This episode was hosted by Mary Childs and Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi. It was produced by Willa Rubin with help from James Sneed and Sam Yellowhorse Kesler. It was edited by Keith Romer and engineered by Josh Newell. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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Economist Florian Ederer tells the story of how he got pulled into a fight over an anonymous economics message board as a sort of string of happenstances.
The first was one day last spring.
The real catalyzing event in all of this is just a conversation with my friend Kyle Jensen, who is not an economist.
Kyle Jensen is an engineer with experience writing computer code.
He lectures at Yale's School of Management.
And that day, the two of them were taking a stroll around New Haven.
Kyle had recently sat in on some econ seminars, and he was telling Florian how aggressive the conversation had gotten.
And I told him, look, we have a relatively aggressive tone in seminars, but there's much, much more aggressive behavior in economics.
You should read the type of, of stuff that gets said on the Internet about various people.
And he said, what do you mean what gets said on the Internet?
People discuss economists on the Internet and said, well, there's this platform called Econ job market rumors.
Economics job market rumors.
One half of the website is a sort of job information wiki where people anonymously post about what's going on inside the black box of economics departments.
The anonymity lets academic insiders pass on information without fear of professional consequences, stuff thats directly relevant to people applying for.
Jobs, about which universities have sent out invites for interviews, or which have given offers out, or even who has been receiving those offers.
The other half of the website is a discussion forum where anyone with an Internet connection can ask the economics hive mind whatever they want, also anonymously, which.
Made it pretty popular.
Economics is this notoriously hierarchical field.
It can be hard to navigate for people outside the elite echelons of academia, and this place was democratizing potentially useful information.