Thanks for the comment. I’ve decided the most important thing is to learn to do my own expected value analysis for research programs.
Maybe econ is different from poli sci, but my experience is that grad students are extremely attuned to what the academic job market rewards, and if they don’t start out that way, their advisors eventually push them in that direction.”
I’ve been exploring this, and it appears to be a difference between the disciplines. Not sure why yet.
Since the academic market rewards difficult, technical work, the sort of work that doesn’t do well on the job market can also be fairly tractable.”
This makes sense. For example, looking at why some countries start charter cities and some do not would be very qualitative and poorly rewarded. But it would be really high-QALY.
Descriptive work
That actually makes a lot of sense. There could be some great descriptive work on aid which is non-causal.
Replications get okay rewards in Poli-Sci, since you might find a different method decision and be able to publish a new results. I plan to do lots of these.
I’d also love to see some meta-research on what researchers believe to be the highest-impact topics to study. Maybe you could ask faculty in your department what they would recommend an altruist work on? I wish I’d spoken to more of my professors about this since their suggestions were invaluable.
Thanks for this advice. It is valuable and I have already started doing it. Responses vary by professor. Some of them are like “utility...for people...we’ve never asked that question in this field. I have no idea” and some are like “yes of course, here are my thoughts”. As a culture, political science is surprisingly non-activist compared to economics, in the sense that many pol scientists take no normative positions. Lots to learn about here.
Thanks for the comment. I’ve decided the most important thing is to learn to do my own expected value analysis for research programs.
I’ve been exploring this, and it appears to be a difference between the disciplines. Not sure why yet.
This makes sense. For example, looking at why some countries start charter cities and some do not would be very qualitative and poorly rewarded. But it would be really high-QALY.
That actually makes a lot of sense. There could be some great descriptive work on aid which is non-causal.
Replications get okay rewards in Poli-Sci, since you might find a different method decision and be able to publish a new results. I plan to do lots of these.
Thanks for this advice. It is valuable and I have already started doing it. Responses vary by professor. Some of them are like “utility...for people...we’ve never asked that question in this field. I have no idea” and some are like “yes of course, here are my thoughts”. As a culture, political science is surprisingly non-activist compared to economics, in the sense that many pol scientists take no normative positions. Lots to learn about here.