Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, interesting. So I’m curious to push further on one question. You asked me what I would want to be studying: why don’t you think people are studying the cost questions as much as it seems like they should be? If these are as big a questions for society, and it certainly seems like they’re issues that most people have — what are the structural barriers that are preventing the top people in these fields from deciding to go study it? Is it that the fields don’t line up with it? Is it that there’s not funding for it? Is it too hard in certain ways? Like, what are the dynamics that are going on here? There are many big questions. It’s hard to study them. So at the end, you have quite a speculative answer or set of hypothesis. So the world as a whole isn’t sure what to make of that. Is it a real contribution? So the private return to you as a researcher maybe is unclear. So you tend to get very famous people who are quite well established looking at really big ideas maybe a bit later in their career. And I’m not saying that’s bad work, but it’s not necessarily cutting-edge either. And they spent their whole lives being famous, and they’re not necessarily in a position to actually make the breakthrough. And then younger people, their incentive is to first get established and do something that is quite defensible. So I think in general, big questions are under-studied. The tenure system, I think, increasingly is broken. A lot of academics do work pretty hard, but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters, I think we need to change. And the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them and actually try doing things, we need more of that. I’ve often suggested for graduate school, instead of taking a class, everyone should be sent to a not-so-high-income village for two weeks. They can do whatever they want. Just go for two weeks, think about things. No one wants to do this. No one wants to experiment with it. People who do development often do it on their own. But the notion that every economist should have studied the East Asian economic miracle, the Industrial Revolution, and spent two weeks or more in a poor village — it’s just not how things are, and I’d like to change that. So how does one go about changing that? So if you’re trying to create a network of people who feel like they have an incentive to study this because it’s gonna be good for their career, and they have a network of supportive people who might be reviewing the grants or the work that they’re doing and also think that this is important work to be done — how do you go about establishing that?…

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