But this doesn't explain the 28x enrichment in New England but not the Pacific Northwest in the U.S. (although maybe the Pacific NW has caught up in the meantime?).

New England social scientists are just *not* that much better at handling cognitive complexity compared to others.

Also, there are numerous areas in many social sciences where, if you're not steeped in the culture of the field, where there are a lot of obviously dodgy assumptions without adequate evidential support.

It's especially well-documented that this is the case in economics because it's so heavily mathematical; people win Nobel prizes for noticing and investigating problems (e.g. "people are commonly nonrational actors with nontransitive preferences") but you still find a myriad of papers trundling along as though you can ignore this--not test for it, just ignore it!--and still have it of relevance to actual human behavior. Psychology is probably worse: there are a lot of effects of age, culture, etc., that have both been extensively documented to be really important and simultaneously aren't rigorously and routinely tested or corrected for before people start taking conclusions for granted.

Now, I don't bring this up to specifically disparage economists and psychologists; the point is just that they have the same human traits that we all do, and they run into their limitations with cognitive complexity just like we all do, and they're not *that* much better than people in other disciplines in that regard.

It doesn't explain the strength of the pattern.