Text Box: By Stanley W. Angrist Text Box: “ Useful” is not a word that springs to mind when one considers the work of many academic economists. They spend much of their lives writing tedious technical papers, many of which try to explain, for example, how many angles can dance on the head of a pin while not producing distortions in the gross national product. These treatises, written mostly for their colleagues, are the basis on which academic careers are made or broken. So how do they feel when their work is criticized, or even scorned, by their peers when it is sent out for review before publication? You can find a number of interesting answers to that question in “Rejected” (Thomas Horton Text Box: and Daughters, 161 pages, $29.95) edited by George Shepherd, an attorney and now a graduate student in economics at Stanford. Mr. Shepherd sent letters to more than 120 leading economists asking them to describe instances in which journals had rejected their papers. The most fascinating aspect of the book is the list of papers rejected by journals upon first submission that later became classics in the field. Included on this list are Fisher Black and Myron Scholes’s 1973 paper on pricing options, Paul Krugman’s 1979 work on monopolistic competition and international trade and Robert Lucas’s 1972 paper that introduced rational-expectations concepts into monetary theory and macroeconomics. Text Box: Essays in the book from Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and others describe firsthand experiences, or reports from colleagues, on interactions with John Maynard Keynes when he was the editor of the Economic Journal. As Mr. Shepherd says: “A disturbing picture appears of an arrogant powerful Keynes dispensing with referees and shooting carelessly from the hip, with little patience for dissent or alternative approaches.” Text Box: The Human Factor in Economics Text Box: Text Box: Text Box: Text Box: Text Box: