Thanks levin! I realized before I published that I hadn’t gotten nearly enough governance people to review this, and indeed was hoping I’d get help in the comment section.
I’d thus be excited to hear more. Do you have specific questions / subareas of governance that are appreciably benefited by having a background in “economics, political science, legal studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history” rather than a more generic “generalist”-type background (which can include any of the previous, but doesn’t depend on any of them?)
I view the core of this post as trying to push back a bit on inclusive “social scientists are useful!” framings, and instead diving into more specific instances of what kind of jobs and roles are available today that demand specific skills, or alternatively pointing out where I think background isn’t actually key and excellent generalist skills are what are sought.
Great questions, and I guess I agree that generalist skills are probably more important (with one implication being that I’d be less excited about people getting PhDs in these fields than my comment might have implied).
Just as an example, since I’m quite new to the field as well: the project I’m currently working on includes a sub-question that I think an actual economist would be able to make much faster progress on: how does the availability of research talent to top technology firms affect their technological progress?
My impression is that since a lot of important research projects on e.g. ideas for new treaties, historical analogies, military-strategic options seem to similarly break down into sub-questions that vary on how domain-knowledge-demanding they are, social scientists might be able to have an unusual impact working on the more demanding of these sub-questions.
Thanks levin! I realized before I published that I hadn’t gotten nearly enough governance people to review this, and indeed was hoping I’d get help in the comment section.
I’d thus be excited to hear more. Do you have specific questions / subareas of governance that are appreciably benefited by having a background in “economics, political science, legal studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history” rather than a more generic “generalist”-type background (which can include any of the previous, but doesn’t depend on any of them?)
I view the core of this post as trying to push back a bit on inclusive “social scientists are useful!” framings, and instead diving into more specific instances of what kind of jobs and roles are available today that demand specific skills, or alternatively pointing out where I think background isn’t actually key and excellent generalist skills are what are sought.
Great questions, and I guess I agree that generalist skills are probably more important (with one implication being that I’d be less excited about people getting PhDs in these fields than my comment might have implied).
Just as an example, since I’m quite new to the field as well: the project I’m currently working on includes a sub-question that I think an actual economist would be able to make much faster progress on: how does the availability of research talent to top technology firms affect their technological progress?
My impression is that since a lot of important research projects on e.g. ideas for new treaties, historical analogies, military-strategic options seem to similarly break down into sub-questions that vary on how domain-knowledge-demanding they are, social scientists might be able to have an unusual impact working on the more demanding of these sub-questions.