OPEN UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 10, 2006
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by Daniel Drezner
In celebrating the Oakland A's sweep of the Minnesota Twins in the ALDS, the Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Somin explains why he is rooting for the A's--it's because he's a member of George Mason University's law school faculty:
As described in Michael Lewis' book Moneyball, A's General Manager Billy Beane pioneered the use of statistical analysis to guide personnel decisions in major league baseball....
I am a big fan of Beane and his methods, all the more so because George Mason University has used a similar approach in hiring faculty for our law school and economics department, both of which have risen in the rankings almost as fast as Beane's A's rose in the American league standings. Both the A's and GMU use statistical analysis to identify "players" whose productivity has been undervalued by their respective industries, and sign them before the competition catches on. Both also have far less money to spend on payroll than their wealthier competitors, and so have to do more with less.
There are other examples of this strategy paying off--in political science, for example, the University of Rochester vaulted to the top back in the '70s and '80s because they specialized in hiring public choice theorists long before Stanford or Harvard started snapping them up. I have heard more than one political scientist embrace Moneyball as their department's strategy for climbing to the top.
So, it appears that lower-tier departments adopt the Moneyball approach of hiring good but unfashionable scholars as a way of developing a comparative advantage. However, I can think of two reasons why this strategy has long-term drawbacks:
1) In the end, you get poached. All approaches and areas of inquiry become fashionable at some point--even military historians. Once a department has attained a flush of prominence, the old standbys will come with their deep pockets to make lucrative free agent signings. The cream of a department's crop gets poached, leading to a slow decline.The gain of a short-term boost might be worth the price of long-term backsliding, were it not for the second hazard of a Moneyball approach:
2) The risks of overspecialization. When a department hires a lot in a specialty or methodology that is currently unappreciated, they are essentially letting these scholars run the show. A history department dominated by military historians, a political science department dominated by postmodernists, or a law faculty dominated by critical legal theorists risks appearing unfriendly to good scholars from other traditions.
If departments overspecialize, they risk falling into a trap: they can only successfully recruit people from a particular scholarly tradition, but the best of those people will eventually be lured away to premier institutions. Because the social sciences tend to see cutting-edge scholarship emerge from different approaches over time, a department that specializes in one approach risks acquiring blinders about where the rest of the field is going. The end result: a mediocre department stuffed with tenured academics who can't get a job anywhere else and don't know how to identify the up-and-comers in a discipline.
These pitfalls are not necessarily inevitable, but they are a possibility that is often overlooked by Moneyball enthusiasts.
I'd be curious to hear from Open U.'s other contributors and readers--can anyone think of a deartment that vaulted itself to the top using a Moneyball approach, but then managed to stay in the top tier for a sustained period of time?
9 comments
about this approach. First, how well can academics be measured by statistics? The virtue of baseball that makes it so ameable to statistical analysis is that is consists of large numbers of players that each engage in large numbers of encounters with clearly discernable and measureable outcomes. Granted, academics have publication and citation rates, but are those numbers really that useful? And are they really a measure of quality? In baseball, any behavior can be graded by how well it produces wins, but what exactly is a "win" in academia? Also, why does the moneyball approach lead to overspecialization? The U. of Richester method that is mentioned focuses on individuals in less prominent subfields, but that is not the core of the moenyball idea, which is to identify statistically strong performers who do not appear to be so good.
- japepper
October 10, 2006 at 11:29am
First, how well can academics be measured by statistics? Obviously it cannot. But George Mason has made the qualitative assessment that left wing academics are overvalued - the batting average of academia. Thus their economics department has a stronger free market orientation than the University of Chicago. And their law department is strongly federalist. So far it has helped them. I also suspect that this is the reason why a liberal academic like Drezner is the equivalent of the "tools" guy!
- jibaholic
October 10, 2006 at 2:00pm
[posted by Jacob Levy] is that, unlike baseball players, academics don't sign binding multiyear contracts. Tenured or otherwise, they're always free agents, and able to be poached on one year's notice. So a department has a harder time than the A's capitalizing on the discovery that someone's undervalued. That's exacerbated by the fact that one winning season counts as a kind of baseball success, whereas a department tendss to take longer for its new hires to gel into a productive unit.
- openu
October 10, 2006 at 3:30pm
In the Moneyball approach, Billy Beane is working with a strict budget that is given to him by the owner(s)(?) of his franchise. So those guys will always control his budget. In an Academic Setting the budget can increase in any given year. A school that rises to prominence quickly can lure donors, alumni, and investors to endow chairs, make contributions, so on and so forth, thereby giving the up-and-coming school the resources to avoid poaching.
- NMundy31
October 10, 2006 at 3:50pm
Moneyball the baseball hiring strategy is about hiring people who get on base, not focusing on the power hitters and flashy players. There is an academic analogy here - people who publish a lot but are not necessarily the big names. The Harvards of the world and universities who make the mistake of thinking they can become Harvard by hiring the right people will throw away lots of money trying to attract big name academics. It's a common error. On the contrary, in particular fields lots of programs succeed by hiring the people who publish regularly and guide the science, regardless of whether they are responsible for "big" ideas. Publishing regularly is getting on base. About this blog, japepper has it right - the commentary seems to be about a different scheme: hiring people in novel or underrepresented subject areas. Whether or not it works, that's not the moneyball approach.
- redemption438
October 10, 2006 at 7:33pm
[Posted by Dan Drezner] to japepper: The question of whether statistics can measure an academic's value in the same way as a baseball player's is a good one. It would be safe to say that the academic stats are probably not as good. On overspecialization, Rochester did not focus on neglected subfields, but on neglected methodologies that transcend subfields. Hence the possible overspecialization. To jibaholic: I'm not trying to tear down the Moneyball approach so much as point out possible drawbacks. As for my political ideology, I hate to disappoint you, but contra your stereotype, I'm a registered Republican. To Jacob: Hi. And another key difference: in academia, the players ARE the general managers. Because departments hire their own, there is the natural tendency for a dominant subgroup to want to hire their own. To NMundy31: "In an Academic Setting the budget can increase in any given year." BWA HA HA HA HA!! Actually, this is a fair point -- some universities, like UT-Austin in the eighties and NYU this decade, have spent their way into the top tier. However, by and large most academic departments most of the time face an even harsher budgetary environment than the Oakland A's. To redemtion438: Moneyball was most certainly NOT just about hiring people who get on base. It was about hiring people whom the market undervalues. At the time Lewis wrote his book, that was on-base percentage. Beane, however, recognizing the shift in the market value of high OBP players, switched to more defensive-minded players and young pitching very quickly. The question I raise in this post is whether departments that succeed based on recognizing one undervalued market niche are supple enough to switch their focus once that niche becomes properly valued.
- drezner
October 10, 2006 at 9:31pm
some universities, like UT-Austin in the eighties and NYU this decade, have spent their way into the top tier Just curious-- no snark intended-- how much $$$ is required to persuade a top academic to park himself in Austin instead of Princeton or Cambridge for 10+ years? What does the price-elasticity of supply for professors look like? Also, do profs take into consideration quality of life issues (housing prices, sunshine etc), or are their decisions mainly driven by institutions' snob value/ranking/pecking order?
- teplukhin
October 11, 2006 at 12:05am
"by and large most academic departments most of the time face an even harsher budgetary environment than the Oakland A's." I almost feel this statement may be false. While many academic departments may have the same budgetary tightness the A's do, these departments by no means face the amount of disproportion the A's face in the baseball world. An University that is looking to join the Harvards of the World, does not face the same uphill financial battle the Oakland A's face trying to join the Yankees of the League.
- NMundy31
October 11, 2006 at 3:37pm
In jibaholic's post, I read "federalist" to mean "movement conservative," and in his comment about the post author's politics, I read "liberal" to mean "not movement conservative." Registered Republican in this case being something like the SRs or the Mensheviks were to the Bolshies.
- merrilld
October 11, 2006 at 5:32pm