Comment by viburnum

Economics is the most cliquish field by far. There are basically five universities that matter, they get all the citations, no matter how dumb their research is. It's just fashion (and grant money). Everybody else desperately tries to win favor with the elite and just replicates their worst tendencies. In a real science you get citations all over the place. In economics all the citations are Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford/Chicago. Somehow it's impossible that anybody in South Dakota or Missouri could ever do anything worthwile, I wonder how that's possible. The cliquish gives them license to support whatever insane ideas the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world prefer.