Kevin Munger has an interesting piece on economics imperialism — the tendency of economists to study topics that seemingly belong to other disciplines. He asks economists to push back. Fine, I’ll bite. I work in an economics department but took my PhD in political science, so I've seen both sides of the fence. And I do work in genetics, so I practice imperialism (though maybe piracy is a better word).
One comment. Rachel Croson once gave a keynote on Economic Imperialism. Her advice was: work with good natives (don't think she used that word), go to their conference. Publish in their journals. She did it in OR, but I think this is where most of economics fails. The rush to publish in top-5, and to a lesser degree in top fields leaves little scope for communicating with other disciplines. We have both published econ-style papers in other disciplines. We know this has a cost. I was told explicitly, upfront and ongoing, that these publications do not count towards promotion. I suspect it's worse in leading US departments. Most people are not interested in broad communication, especially as those come at the expense of publications within economics (I know anecdotally of one case where a top-5 editor explicitly rejected a paper because the authors published aspects of the research in a top non-econ journal). This not only stunts scientific progress, but leads to some cases where economists publish research that is methodologically rigorous, but completely misses the point, as they are not experts in the domain.
One comment. Rachel Croson once gave a keynote on Economic Imperialism. Her advice was: work with good natives (don't think she used that word), go to their conference. Publish in their journals. She did it in OR, but I think this is where most of economics fails. The rush to publish in top-5, and to a lesser degree in top fields leaves little scope for communicating with other disciplines. We have both published econ-style papers in other disciplines. We know this has a cost. I was told explicitly, upfront and ongoing, that these publications do not count towards promotion. I suspect it's worse in leading US departments. Most people are not interested in broad communication, especially as those come at the expense of publications within economics (I know anecdotally of one case where a top-5 editor explicitly rejected a paper because the authors published aspects of the research in a top non-econ journal). This not only stunts scientific progress, but leads to some cases where economists publish research that is methodologically rigorous, but completely misses the point, as they are not experts in the domain.