Mind you, that editor was right – economics was changed after it was published.

The message I took from the problems the article just scrapes the surface of was that I didn’t want to spend a lot of time in farcical exercises such as the one you outline above. If I was a lot smarter than I am it might have been worth it, but then if that were the case again, I expect I could spend my time more profitably than fitting ideas into the latest obsessions and fads of the mediocre. If I was a very smart fellow I’d rather be Stephen Wolfram than Ed Prescott.

“Several years ago I gave a seminar about some of my research. I started out with a very simple example. One of the faculty in the audience interrupted me to say that he hadworked on something like this several years ago, but his model was much more complex”.I replied “My model was complex when I started, too, but I just kept working on it till it got simple!”

How to Build An Economic Model in Your Spare Time

By June of 1967 the paper was ready and I sent it to The American Economic Review for publication. I was spending the academic year 1967-68 in India. Fairly shortly into my stay there, I received my first rejection letter from The American Economic Review. The editor explained that the Review did not publish papers on subjects of such triviality. In a case, perhaps, of life reproducing art, no referee reports were included.

Michael Farrell, an editor of The Review of Economic Studies, had visited Berkeley in 1966-67, and had urged me to submit “Lemons” to The Review, but he had also been quite explicit in giving no guarantees. I submitted “Lemons” there, which was again rejected on the grounds that the The Review did not publish papers on topics of such triviality.

The next rejection was more interesting. I sent “Lemons” to the Journal of Political Economy, which sent me two referee reports, carefully argued as to why I was incorrect. After all, eggs of different grades were sorted and sold (I do not believe that this is just my memory confusing it with my original perception of the egg-grader model), as were other agricultural commodities. If this paper was correct, then no goods could be traded (an exaggeration of the claims of the paper). Besides and this was the killer if this paper was correct, economics would be different.

I may have despaired, but I did not give up. I sent the paper off to the Quarterly Journal of Economics, where it was accepted.

Perhaps the message is, “Don’t give up!”