Tom Pepinsky

Category: Travel

  • Book Chapters for R1 Assistant Professors

    I can’t resist weighing in on Chris Blattman’s discussion of book chapters. I think that Chris is right that assistant professors should only focus on things that increase the probability of tenure, and that book chapters have real opportunity costs. I also agree that given the choice of placing one nugget of research output in a book chapter and a journal, the journal is better if you want to increase (1) visibility of that piece of research and (2) citations. But book chapters can have indirect benefits that far outweigh these costs.

    Here are some principles to keep in mind.

    Principle 1: Some book chapters imply immediate non-academic benefits.
    In my corners of the discipline, an invitation to contribute to a book chapter is usually not an invitation to sit in my office and write. It is also an invitation to a conference, usually someplace interesting, always on someone else’s dime, and sometimes with an honorarium. In my case, book chapters have (1) paid for part of my honeymoon, (2) introduced me to the single best bowl of noodles that I have ever eaten, and (3) helped to keep my United FF status at high levels, among many others. Each of those things has value.

    Principle 2: Some book chapters have non-immediate academic benefits.
    The folk wisdom within my household is that the connections that I have made at edited book conferences have been among the most enduring and valuable professional connections that I have ever made. These are people who certainly wrote tenure letters for me, they are people who have helped me to get jobs, they are people who review my manuscripts. They are also, in many cases, my friends. Would we have become friends otherwise? Maybe. Would they have written tenure letters for me otherwise? Again, maybe. But I am confident that I am on better footing because we spent two days working together on a common intellectual project, where they got to know me and see what I do. If you insist on thinking of opportunity costs, think of the real benefit of the book chapter as the experience that comes with working on it, and the effort devoted to writing the chapter as the price of having that experience.

    Principle 3: Some research outputs don’t belong in journals.
    Sometimes my research projects have not panned out the way that I had wanted them to. It happens to all of us. Given that, it is often possible to create a book chapter out of a piece that would not survive peer review at a good journal but that could survive peer review as a piece of a broader multi-author project at a good press. So long as the effort required to convert the research is low enough, it may be worthwhile to do this. Chris’s implicit belief that a piece of research is better as an article than as a chapter is true as a ceteris paribus statement. But ceteris is not always paribus, and there is a “citations-networking” tradeoff.

    Principle 4: Signaling games have many equilibria
    Perhaps the most insidious belief about book chapters is that you work on them if you don’t have anything else to do. This means that book chapters reveal information about your type—“high types” write articles because they can, “low types” write book chapters because they can’t write articles. This is the standard “beer-quiche” game. But when our choices are supposed to be signals, and then what we rationally learn from them depends on the information structure of the game, prior beliefs, etc. It’s not hard to work up a pooling equilibrium in which low types write chapters because they write can’t write articles, and high types write chapters and articles because writing a chapter signals that you are a high enough type to be able to afford to write chapters. (Presumably “write articles and chapters” is observable, but just allow for a continuum of types and some unobservables, and the point stands.)

    So if I didn’t know anything about you, your position in the discipline(s) or field(s) in which you work, the nature of the edited volume, the other participants, or the “extras” that come along with it, I would advise against writing a book chapter. The generic advice against book chapters is right. Or if the book chapter came with no opportunity for networking, no non-academic benefits, and required you to devote effort that could be better devoted to journal articles or books. In that case, again, don’t write that book chapter.

    But it’s not hard to work up a good argument that given the right circumstances, a particular project writing a chapter for an edited book is worthwhile. Don’t rule them out. I regret nothing about the chapters that I wrote as an assistant professor, and I am completely confident that I have done better professionally for it. Your mileage may vary, but I don’t know, and no one else does either, not in the abstract.

    I will say, this, though. Do not, under any circumstances, edit a book as an assistant professor. This advice is unconditional.

  • How to Eat in Jakarta

    Tyler Cowen went to Jakarta recently and has provided his advice on how to eat well there. It makes sense to look for his advice: Cowen has a very interesting book on the economist’s take on good eating. Now, the “economist takes on some unrelated field and writes a trade book” genre is so very tiring, despite the very attractive promises that these economists can optimize my life. That said, Cowen’s food book is pretty good, and very sensible about most things. His advice about eating in Jakarta, though, misses the mark.

    Some principles:

    1. Sanitation is a mess in Jakarta. Street food—real street food—will very frequently make you sick[*] unless you stick only to bakso. I mean really sick. Typhoid or hepatitis sick. The problem is that many dishes are served lukewarm, or with lukewarm sauces or sambals, or with raw vegetables as garnishes (common in Sundanese cuisine, from the region surrounding Jakarta).
    2. As a rule, regular restaurants are no better. On average you are less likely to get sick at a “restaurant with walls” but this is really only a statement of averages. Mall restaurants, and especially padang food restaurants, can be very dangerous.
    3. There is a category of food-for-sale that lies between cart (kaki lima) and restaurant: the warung. I suspect that this is what he means by “street food.”

    There are plenty of lousy restaurants in Jakarta (my favorite example is Bakmi GM). But as a rule, restaurants and more established warungs completely and totally dominate street food. There are good examples of street food (of the warung variety) that is tasty, but here’s the funny thing: the best street vendors morph into more regular establishments! It ceases to be “street food” in the customary sense of the word because entrepreneurs know how to make money, and it’s not by doing street food.

    Examples: Nasi Goreng Kambing Kebon Sirih has a website and offers catering! Another favorite Menteng warung of mine, Warung Ngalam, also has a website, and twitter.

    This means that Cowen’s final sentence is exactly wrong:

    Knowledge of specific restaurants is not the key here.

    On the contrary, knowing specific restaurants is absolutely key. That’s how you know a tasty and safe warung from a typhoid warung, and also how you know which of many warungs with the same name in the same place is the “right” one. It’s also, obviously, how you know a good restaurant from an average one.

    Another issue that Cowen touches on is malls and buffets. I think he’s on firmer ground here, although I will say that I’ve never had good Indonesian food at any Indonesian buffet. You can get really, really good food at a nice Indonesian hotel buffet, but it’s good Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or Western food.

    So if the goal is to eat good Indonesian food in Jakarta, and you’re a newcomer, I don’t at all recommend following Cowen’s advice. Instead, you need recommendations from trusted and experienced sources. Do not waste your time with real street food: any version of anything you can find on the street will probably taste better at a restaurant. But even then, be careful, because four walls and air conditioning is no guarantee of safety. Malls are fine, and upscale malls are the most likely to be safe. But the best restaurants and warungs are still the stand-alone kind, and to figure out which ones are worth the time and effort to get there, you need an expert.

    [*] You often hear the recommendation that you should eat street food in foreign countries even if it makes you sick. I agree that it’s an interesting experience, but there should be limits to this. And especially if you’re new in town, or only have a few days, spending three of them in bed with a horrible stomach bug does not seem like the best use of your time. Having experienced that myself, I can assure you that nothing for sale on the street in Jakarta tastes that good.

    The same is not true in Kuala Lumpur, where the food is tastier and less likely to make you sick. Go to Jalan Alor or Bangsar or Masjid India and have at it.