About the chart above:

Once upon a time, economists regularly used to publicly criticise each other’s work in academic journals. But not any more.
In Figure 1 I have illustrated the degree to which economists have stopped debating. The data have been culled from Jstor, the online database of academic journals. To estimate the number of debating articles for each year, I searched for articles with “comment”, “reply”, and/or “rejoinder” in their titles, as these are the key words used to indicate a comment on someone else’s article and a reply to that comment. I did the search for the five most prestigious economics journals. I then used the total number of articles in those five journals in each year as the denominator.
Figure 1 shows how there was a dramatic increase in the level of debate in economics from the 1920s through the 1960s. Then, however, there was an equally dramatic fall. At the peak level, in 1968, fully 22 per cent of the articles published in these journals appear to have been related to debate. By 2013, however, just 2 per cent were.

I’m not wild about the author’s explanations for the chart he created. (Or, for that matter, the methodology he used to make the chart.) But the general point that peer-reviewed economics journals have changed a lot over the decades is clearly correct. And I think you could reasonably argue that academic economists are having less of a collective conversation than they used to. If that’s reflected in the journals, I’m not surprised.

— Michael R. Strain is deputy director of economic policy studies and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/MichaelRStrain.