When doing post-publication peer review, it is easy to become pessimistic about the whole human enterprise of knowledge production. It is easy to run out of patience due to the errors one finds. Furthermore, even if I find a fault in one of the articles published in the “top five” economics journals, I know that it will not be retracted or even corrected.
The article “The Agricultural Origins of Time Preference” (2016) by Oded Galor and Ömer Özak is a case in point. Published in the American Economic Review, the article presents a grand narrative of persistence. Galor and Özak hypothesize that “geographical variations in the natural return to agricultural investment generated a persistent effect on the distribution of time preference across societies” (p. 3065). Higher potential crop yields and shorter growth cycles, they say, rewarded delayed gratification, so a culture of long-term orientation was selected for over generations and persists in populations today.
The article has garnered over 1,000 citations on Google Scholar, but it is in no way, shape, or form robust.
