Who makes a good editor?
When Paul Milgrom recommended me to replace him as a co-editor of the American Economic Review, a post I held over nine years, one of the attributes he gave as a justification for the recommendation was that I am opinionated. At the time, I considered “opinionated†to mean ‘holding opinions without regard to the facts,’ and indeed dictionary definitions suggest ‘stubborn adherence to preconceived notions.’ But there is another side to being opinionated, which means having a view. It is a management truism that having a vision based on false hypotheses is better than a lack of vision, and like all truisms it is probably false some of the time, but the same feature holds true in editing: the editor’s main job is to decide what is published, and what is not. Having some basis for deciding definitely dominates the absence of a basis. Even if I don’t like to think of myself as “obstinate, stubborn or bigoted,†it is valuable to have an opinion about everything.
Edifying Editing – (PDF file) – by R. Preston McAfee
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Resources For Economists (The American Economic Association’s directory) about CFM:
This site offers a variety of material for those interested in “prediction markets” (markets where participants trade instruments whose price reflects the probability of future events). While somewhat opinionated, many will likely find it useful for its breadth of coverage.
