After the crisis, economics needs to slow down

This is the twelfth post in a six-week series: Rapid or Rushed? exploring rapid response publishing in covid times. Read the rest of the series here. As part of the series, there was a virtual roundtable featuring Professor Joshua Gans (Economics in the Age of COVID-19, MIT Press), in conversation with Richard Horton (The COVID-19 Catastrophe, Polity Press and Editor of The Lancet), Victoria Pittman (Bristol University Press) and Qudsiya Ahmed (Cambridge University Press, India) In this post, Joshua Gans, a panellist on the Impact blog’s virtual roundtable reflects on how the covid crisis has accelerated research and publishing in the field of economics. Academic books have been reinvigorated for scholarly pursuits in responding to the pandemic. However, the current rate of publishing is both too slow (with newsletters providing a more real-time dissemination of research than articles or books) and too fast- economic research is supposed to have a slow considered pace, and affecting conventional economic policy is a long process.