Academia for academia's sake

Two decades ago, a Princeton professor was working through the grind of an untenured position. His work was productive but dull, his pay decent but not high, and his office was a pile of books hidden in the dark back corner of a basement. To relieve the boredom, this professor began researching a fun side project. Similar tales could be told of a number of professors in a number of fields, but this particular example involves a man named Orley Ashenfelter and his forays into wine economics.

Ashenfelter was interested in buying good wines at bargain prices. As a labor economist, he therefore began asking questions about the drivers of the price of wine. His time could have been spent on more important things: a deeper understanding of wine clearly is not going to be “in the nation’s service and the service of all nations.” Eliminating poverty in Africa and incentivizing people to become teachers in America are clearly more worthwhile topics of study from a big-picture perspective than wine. But seemingly useless topics such as wine and baseball matter, because they make academia fun.

This story has been told to me by both Ashenfelter himself when I took ECO 200: Advanced Principles of Economics two years ago and by Ian Ayres’ book “Super Crunchers.” Through retelling, the tale has been reworked into a glorification of the heroics of a lone economist against an irrational industry. Ashenfelter’s opponent and the villain of this story is Robert Parker Jr., wine critic. Parker began his career as a wine critic with the aim of countering the biases and conflicts of interest of other critics. He introduced his own rating system that scored wines on a scale from 50 to 100 and complemented his reviews with paragraphs rich in adjectives. Parker, in his own way, revolutionized wine criticism, and Ashenfelter tried to do the same in his spare time.

From a common sense point of view, wine and labor economics are two very different topics. The offices of the Princeton Industrial Relations Section sit in the basement of Firestone Library, tucked into one of the few places on campus where people do not drink. Economists study equilibria in markets and pore over the latest reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while wine lovers scrutinize colors during wine tastings and fret about which glass to use.

A traditional wine enthusiast may have found good reason to emphasize this gap. Wine, he may have insisted, cannot be treated like “just another good;” it is frighteningly complex. A single bottle will be labeled with its region of origin, the grape variety used and the year of production. With grape-variety blending, variation between years and differences between tasting sessions, it is very difficult to know what is and is not a good wine. Parker made wine appreciation easier by reducing that diversity down to a number. He knew what he liked, and his expert nose judged as he saw fit. Parker and wine lovers like him embraced the difficulty of mastering the subject; they treated wine glasses like vessels of rich, deep magic to get lost in.

In hindsight, Ashenfelter’s revelation was fairly obvious: Of course wine is merely a factor of quantifiable inputs. Ashenfelter wanted good wines at bargain prices and so naturally used the tools of his trade to shake the foundations of the world Parker built. He used hedonic analysis to break down wine into the mere sum of its parts and rob it of its mysticism. His regressions used weather data and end price for Bordeaux wines, with some adjustments, to estimate the impact of weather on quality. His statistical analysis differed little in practice from what other economists do, and yet it yielded a nice, neat little equation with which he could predict wine prices.

Ashenfelter’s work popped a bubble of self-importance in wine critics, and time will tell if it also influenced the way the industry thinks. While the world has larger problems to solve than the factors influencing wine quality, it’s difficult to argue that Ashenfelter’s work on wine has not been worthwhile.

This is academia without a grander purpose and is worth the effort for the fun value alone. Ashenfelter is not alone in approaching non-standard topics academically. In 1978, fellow economics professor Paul Krugman wrote a paper titled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade” that analyzed the effects of general relativity on an international trade theory in a science-fictional world with interstellar colonization. In fact, the world of truly “academic” pursuits has its own awards season: The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate annually the discoveries “that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” according to their website, improbable.com. (Psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer is an Ig Nobel Prize laureate.) This kind of research enriches academia with humor and insight, bringing fun to the stacks in Firestone and making it sometimes just as important as more somber research.