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From an economic point of view, all academic politics reduces to a struggle over the control of funding, the creation of graduate students, the composition of tenure and hiring committees, the editorship of top journals, the quantitative rankings of journals and departments, and the leadership positions of professional associations. These forms of power are all mutually reinforcing. After all, an academic discipline socially reproduces itself generation to generation when professors train grad students who then become professors, all sharing the appropriate methodology. The committees decide who gets hired and who gets the full-time, well-paying, permanent jobs. And the committees” key metric (besides an assessment of the dissertation) is the ranking of the candidate’s home department and of the journals they’ve been published in or cited by. Rankings are most often the creation of influential individual professors, professional groups like the American Economics Association, or trade publications like US News & World Report influenced by the former. And finally, individual departments’ rankings in particular are (along with enrollments) key to securing their long-term funding—particularly as a way of preventing getting axed when their university faces a budget crunch.