Malikane: ‘I am being called mad, yet I am a professor at Wits’

When Fin24 contacted Professor Chris Malikane, he reportedly refused to speak to the media, saying he was viewed as a "mad person". He was quoted as saying "I am being called mad, yet I am a professor at Wits, writing articles for international journals. I am called crazy and mad, mentally demented."

Far be it from me to judge whether his claims about being unjustly vilified — or about being sane — are accurate or not. But one might, reasonably, wonder about the writings of any academic economist who seems to welcome turning his country into Venezuela, at least if media reports are to be believed. Most economic training deals with issues of growth, development and industrialisation, not the opposite. What kind of articles would an economist who holds the reported views of Malikane write, and which reputable journal would possibly publish them?

Luckily, a primary function of research universities is to institutionalise and — yes! — bureaucratise knowledge and its creation. An entire industry has therefore developed to assess the quantity and quality of scholarly work. And the results are transparent, easy to understand, and accessible to everyone who has a web browser.

In summary, for those who were wondering, Malikane’s academic work has no bearing on how best to impoverish countries and why; instead, it seems to focus on various technical aspects of macro-economic models, and, bizarrely, some old policy work on plastics (The Graduate, anyone?). But it also seems to be largely ignored by other experts. Which speaks volumes.

But first some background. Modern academia has become incredibly specialised. There may be only a handful of people who have enough expertise to give an informed opinion on any particular academic paper. A way around this, used by academic administrators the world over, is to determine the quality of a paper not by looking at the paper itself, but rather by counting the number of times other academics have cited it (that is, referred to it in their own work).

Writing that is influential is cited frequently by other academics. Work that is not cited is therefore not influential. This method of ranking papers works incredibly well — so well, in fact, that Google’s founders copied it and used it to create their search engine. Google ranks web pages not by their content but according to how frequently other web pages link to them. The more web pages that refer to a given page, the more reliable other creators of web pages think that page is, and the higher it ranks in Google searches.

Of course, citation counts are not perfect. Positive and negative citations are treated equally. So if Malikane had published any academic articles about why, exactly, we would want to de-develop and de-industrialise SA and how best we should go about doing it (unsurprisingly, it turns out, he has not) citations of the type "Malikane (2017) — absurdly — believes that South Africans should welcome the massive declines in real wages and increases in unemployment that Venezuelans have been forced to endure under Hugo Chàvez and, more recently, the hapless Nicolàs Maduro", would be treated equally to the rather dry, but hardly adulatory "The switch from discrete to continuous time is in line with papers by Asada et al (2006), Chen et al (2006a,b), and Malikane and Semmler (2008a,b), but no previous New Keynesian approach has taken this step".

Also, citations can be (and often are) self-generated by academics citing their own work, in much the same way that websites try to strategically move up Google rankings. But these quibbles aside, citation counts are routinely used to judge individual academic papers, academic journals (just like papers, these vary significantly in quality), and academics themselves.

I invite you to explore the world of academic literature, using Malikane as an example. Using your favourite web browser, go to scholar.google.com and, in the search box, type in "C Malikane". The result is the contribution of Malikane to the world’s scholarly literature.

To his credit, there is a small number of articles in lower-tier academic journals (along with what look like student dissertations and some almost unread policy papers on the plastics industry). Most of them are co-authored and many seem to be technical discussions of a certain class of macro-economic models.

One surely needs to be an expert to appreciate them — and this is definitely not my own field of expertise. But it is not difficult to see that Malikane’s (and co-author’s) writings are not highly regarded by others who do work in that field. In fact, he is listed as author or co-author on only two articles that have garnered more than 10 citations (academics call this number the i-10 index), and only five articles that he has authored or co-authored have been cited more than five times (this is called the h-index). And one of those seems to be a working paper that, 10 years later, has not yet made it into print. Using Google Scholar to compare scholarly output is a fun game — academics play it for hours. And now you can, too.

Malikane’s public statements, if true, are deeply concerning. His defence — that his work is published in international journals — we can safely ignore. Malikane’s academic work focuses very narrowly on highly technical tweaks to a certain class of economic models. But the true measure of academic influence is not where you publish, it is how many others are willing to publicly acknowledge that they have used your work to further their own. And by this measure, a charitable view is that other experts think little of Malikane’s past work in his chosen field — which is the only field his academic work qualifies him to advise anyone in.

Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba is responsible for the current and future livelihoods of 50-million South Africans, and millions of economic migrants from neighbouring countries. In the unlikely event that the minister wants advice on obscure technical aspects of macro-economic modelling (or on plastics) he should know that very few other experts defer to Malikane’s skills in this area. The minister could, very easily, do very much better. And if the minister wants advice on how to turn the country into Venezuela, why does he bother talking to Malikane? He might as well just ask his own boss.

• McCarthy obtained a PhD in applied economics from the University of Pennsylvania, and was full professor of actuarial science at Wits