Senior academics or practitioners have the accumulated experience and knowledge to be able to write grand syntheses of their subjects, or to put forward grand theories, without those just being wild speculation. This fund would proactively support and/or retroactively reward work of this type. To make this kind of work more likely, the fund could seek out academics that seem in a particularly good place to create a work of this type and encourage them to do this. In addition, the fund could support the writing of both a popular and an academic version of the work. This could help overcome the issue where popular grand syntheses tend to be widely influential, even when they are seen as dubious by experts (e.g. as happened with Guns, Germs, and Steel).
Examples of the kinds of works I mean: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Vaclav Smil’s Creating the Twentieth Century, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Great! Some of them may need (or benefit from) ghostwriters. I don’t know how easy it is to find good ghostwriters for a given subject, but that could be another problem that such an organization could solve for them.
Synthesis book fund/prize
Senior academics or practitioners have the accumulated experience and knowledge to be able to write grand syntheses of their subjects, or to put forward grand theories, without those just being wild speculation. This fund would proactively support and/or retroactively reward work of this type. To make this kind of work more likely, the fund could seek out academics that seem in a particularly good place to create a work of this type and encourage them to do this. In addition, the fund could support the writing of both a popular and an academic version of the work. This could help overcome the issue where popular grand syntheses tend to be widely influential, even when they are seen as dubious by experts (e.g. as happened with Guns, Germs, and Steel).
Examples of the kinds of works I mean: James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Vaclav Smil’s Creating the Twentieth Century, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II.
Great! Some of them may need (or benefit from) ghostwriters. I don’t know how easy it is to find good ghostwriters for a given subject, but that could be another problem that such an organization could solve for them.