Tom DiLorenzo was one of my professors in graduate school and he told us all that if we were working on interesting questions in economics we should be able to publish 3 papers out of each research project — a refereed journal article, a policy study with a think-tank, and an op-ed in a newspaper. I confess that I have never followed this lesson so well, but I do believe it to be sound advice. DiLorenzo’s other sound advice was to develop a thick skin and get used to rejection and to demonstrate this he would pin his journal rejection letters on his office wall.
I have often told graduate students of this “DiLorenzo model” and several of them have successfully followed this research and publication strategy. The best example of this is Ben Powell, who has repeatedly accomplished this publishing trifecta. In the latest example, Ben (with David Skarbek) takes on the policy question of sweatshops. The academic paper is coming out in the Journal of Labor Research, the policy paper will be published by The American Institute for Economic Research, and the op-ed appeared in The Christian Science Monitor. Powell and Skarbek argue in “Don’t get into a lather over sweatshops” that “sweatshops” actually provide a better than average living for their workers. In the local conditions of the countries Powell and Skarbek studied the alternatives to working in sweatshops was prostitution, crime, or choosing between looking through trash or starving. Powell and Skarbek compare sweatshop wages with the average local wages in the country under investigation and demonstrate the basic economic principle that people will be alert to those opportunities which are in their interest to be alert to. To demonstrate their point they examined local wages in the Asian and Latin American countries that have been considered the most egregious examples of sweatshop exploitation.
F. A. Hayek edited Capitalism and the Historians in 1954 to dispel similar myths about the Industrial Revolution. The “as compared to what” question must be continually raised whenever you enter questions of standard of living and human well-being.