HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Great men can be nasty too:

Marshall is being nasty because he knows that the Main methodological contribution of Jevons is the introduction of mathematics as the scientific language of economics. Afterwards in an undated comment [pp. 99-100] he reckons that: "I have learnt more from Jevons than from any one else". 

    John M. Keynes in a rejection letter [Economic Journal, 91 (1981), 199-200] to Knut Wicksell [9th January, 1924]:
    "I must apologise for not having dealt sooner with your proffered contibution to the Economic Journal. I wished, however, to obtain another judgment on it besides my own.
    I am sorry to reply that we cannot accept it for publication in the Economic Journal. Apart from the fact that our space in the near future is already filled, the editors feel that any treatment of this topic at the present day ought to bring in various modern conceptions for handling the problem and that the time has gone by for a criticism of Ricardo on purely Ricardian lines. Nor is it quite correct that the problem in question was not taken up by Ricardo's contemporaries. Ricardo himself discusses it in his letter to MacCulloch 18 June 1821. The question was also discussed in the Political Economy Club on the 8 February 1822. I am indebted for these references to Dr. Bonar"

    Wicksell's reply to Keynes [no date]:
    "I thank you for your letter of the 9 January. I was not very glad to have my paper returned, but of course you are the best judge of what will suit your readers.
    However, I do not quite understand your remarks. How can it be a fault to criticise Ricardo on purely "Ricardian lnes" ? Ricardo may be right on his own lines and still be wrong; but if he is shown to be wrong on his own lines, this, I think, will be conclusive (...) I could shorten the paper very much leaving out f.i. the long verbal quotation from Ricardo, or even compress it into a single paragraph containing only the head argument, just as stated in this letter. Then perhaps your space would admit its insertion ? If not, pray, do not trouble yourself with an answer and believe me, with the greatest respect."

Notice here that Wicksell first replies correctly to Keynes' criticisms and then humiliate himself by begging Keynes to publish his paper by shortening it to fit the alleged space constraint. Author's humiliation seems to be a constant outcome of nasty referees. Of course Keynes never bother to publish the paper, which appeared in the Economic Journal after 55 years as: "Ricardo on machinery and the present unemployment".

    From Gans and Shepherd [How are the mighty fallen: Rejected classic articles by leading economists, Journal of Economic Perspectives 8 (1994), 165-179]:
    "Robert May is a distinguished biologist who has produced important and influential work on chaos theory. Encouraged by several mathematical economists, May and John Beddington submitted an economically-oriented paper on endogenous instability in simple dynamic models to Econometrica. The Journal's editor rejected the paper with fill-the-blanks form letter: "Dear Mr. May, Enclosed is/are the report(s) of a/two referee(s) on your paper. I regret it is not suitable for publication in Econometrica. Yours sincerely, [signature]" . According to May, the lone, two-paragraph referee report indicated that the paper's findings "were well-known and not interesting. I wrote a cross reply to the editor, who said his reviewer was expert and who was I anyway".
    May gave up on economists. "At this point, back then, I simply decided that economists were not worth bothering with (life being very busy), and that generally the ends I wish to serve outside biology would be adequately handled by the review I was then writing for Nature. This was the 1976 Nature review (which remains, I believe, the most cited paper in the filed of 'chaos', which currently is going on for 2,000 citations)".

The important lesson in May's example is that economists lost the opportunity to know better Chaos theory by the middle of the 70's. The Econometrica's editor and referee made us worse off at least by one decade, when finally Chaos theory was applied in economics during the 80's.