The economics world is buzzing about the dustup started by @TheEconomist article below on @DAcemogluMIT. I have a few thoughts that I want to direct to my lay readers, or those who do not know the “inside baseball” of economics. Before those, I want to put my cards on the table. To my eye, Daron has changed the landscape of how we think about why nations succeed and fail. He is a scientist’s scientist; always ready to engage on the merits and have a back and forth to learn. Now the inside baseball stuff: for better or worse, we economists are trained, from our first year of grad school, to poke holes and try to improve each other's work. That’s how our whole ecosystem operates: seminars are 90 minutes of trying to break a paper (and I see that a lot here at @UChicago). We solicit referees to learn about potential flaws…in my three decades as a journal editor, I cannot recall a report ever saying "no flaws found, publish as is." Not for Nobelists, not for anyone. I have never viewed criticism as a scandal in economics. Rather, it is the ecosystem at work. It is how we control quality. Do a poll, get criticism. That's what we do. In this spirit, there is something oddly backwards in the coverage: this adversarial culture is a feature, not a bug. Consider when I served at the Council of Economic Advisers. Day to day, our most valuable contributions were stopping bad ideas from happening. Sure, we occasionally created and refined the good ideas, but a key CEA role was being the person in the room who would stand up and say "that is patently nonsense." No better person to play that role than an economist. And note what makes our system work: even when we criticize anonymously there is accountability. A referee must engage the actual paper, an editor judges the report, and the author can respond. Anonymous quotes over drinks have the anonymity without any of the accountability. That is how I interpret what is happening here with straw polling and cherry picking. Daron, regardless of how good he is (and I know he is very good because I have written lots with him), will receive criticism just like the rest of us, lock, stock, and barrel. And that is fine because a flaw count isn't a verdict.