I understand what you’re saying about the tension. As someone trained in psychology, there’s a litany of papers that ‘solve the problem of not understanding’ with little or no ‘problem solving’ benefit.
Having said that, I think those incentives are changing. In the UK and Australia, universities are now being evaluated and incentivised based on how well they solve problems (e.g. https://www.arc.gov.au/engagement-and-impact-assessment). I think, in general, your motivation and career would not be hurt by doing things that focus on engagement with people who have important problems, and helping to impact their decision-making.
Personally, I think even the best ‘solve the problem of not understanding’ questions start with a problem in real life. I think medicine is a good example of where academic success is often directly correlated with how well your research either solves important problems or has promise to solve problems.
Still, I never dissuade my students from trying to solve important problems. Even if one of their studeis is something more ‘theoretical’, I try to ensure they’re working backwards from the important problem that’s worth solving. To your use example above, even if you do come up with a more general theory of philanthropic portfolio management, you’d hope that your intro and discussion could still speak to how it helps someone answer the policy question: “How much money should I allocate to x vs. y?”
One thing I’d point out is that there are many areas where solving problems does also lead to academic success. Systematic reviews are cited to the hilt because they try to solve an important problem (“what works?”). Knowledge translation is a whole field of taking stuff trapped in universities and getting it out into practice to solve problems. Very very few interventions do economic analyses of their cost-benefit, and those that do often struggle to put a dollar value on the benefit. For example, in this study, we could calculate the cost per bit of childhood cardiovascular health, but couldn’t put a dollar value on the bit of cardiovascular health: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2779446
One of my deepest regrets was trying to focus my PhD on something that was theoretically interesting but practically far from helping the most disadvantaged (i.e., do you need to control or accept your emotions to perform under pressure?). I did this because I thought that was what you were ‘supposed’ to do, and because I thought it was interesting. If I had my time over, I would have started with a bigger problem then worked backwards to find the something interesting and ‘at the frontier of knowledge.’
Thanks for your detailed reply. Absolutely, there is some academic reward available from solving problems. Naively, the goal is to impress other academics (and thus get published, cited), and academics are more impressed when the work solves a problem.
You seem to encourage problem-solving work, and point out that governments are starting to push academia in that direction. This is great, and to me, it raises the interesting question of optimal policy in rewarding research. That is supremely difficult, at least outside of the commercialisable. My understanding is that optimal policy would pay each researcher something like the marginal societal benefit of their work, summed globally and intertemporally forever. How on earth do you estimate that for the seminal New Keynesian model paper? Governments won’t come close, and (I imagine) will tend to focus on projects whose benefits can be more easily measured or otherwise justified. So we are back to the problem of misaligned researcher incentives. But surely a government push towards impact is a step in the right direction.
Until our civilisation solves that optimal policy problem, I think academia will continue to incentivise the pursuit of knowledge at least partly for knowledge’s sake. I wrote the post because understanding the implications of that has been useful to me.
I understand what you’re saying about the tension. As someone trained in psychology, there’s a litany of papers that ‘solve the problem of not understanding’ with little or no ‘problem solving’ benefit.
Having said that, I think those incentives are changing. In the UK and Australia, universities are now being evaluated and incentivised based on how well they solve problems (e.g. https://www.arc.gov.au/engagement-and-impact-assessment). I think, in general, your motivation and career would not be hurt by doing things that focus on engagement with people who have important problems, and helping to impact their decision-making. Personally, I think even the best ‘solve the problem of not understanding’ questions start with a problem in real life. I think medicine is a good example of where academic success is often directly correlated with how well your research either solves important problems or has promise to solve problems.
As a fledgling economist, however, I do see you point. There are strong incentives in some fields to come up with some new theory than to solve some existing problem. I guess this is true in medicine too, where there’s more money on research for male pattern baldness than malaria (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/bill-gates-why-do-we-care-more-about-baldness-malaria-8536988.html).
Still, I never dissuade my students from trying to solve important problems. Even if one of their studeis is something more ‘theoretical’, I try to ensure they’re working backwards from the important problem that’s worth solving. To your use example above, even if you do come up with a more general theory of philanthropic portfolio management, you’d hope that your intro and discussion could still speak to how it helps someone answer the policy question: “How much money should I allocate to x vs. y?”
One thing I’d point out is that there are many areas where solving problems does also lead to academic success. Systematic reviews are cited to the hilt because they try to solve an important problem (“what works?”). Knowledge translation is a whole field of taking stuff trapped in universities and getting it out into practice to solve problems. Very very few interventions do economic analyses of their cost-benefit, and those that do often struggle to put a dollar value on the benefit. For example, in this study, we could calculate the cost per bit of childhood cardiovascular health, but couldn’t put a dollar value on the bit of cardiovascular health: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2779446 One of my deepest regrets was trying to focus my PhD on something that was theoretically interesting but practically far from helping the most disadvantaged (i.e., do you need to control or accept your emotions to perform under pressure?). I did this because I thought that was what you were ‘supposed’ to do, and because I thought it was interesting. If I had my time over, I would have started with a bigger problem then worked backwards to find the something interesting and ‘at the frontier of knowledge.’
Thanks for your detailed reply. Absolutely, there is some academic reward available from solving problems. Naively, the goal is to impress other academics (and thus get published, cited), and academics are more impressed when the work solves a problem.
You seem to encourage problem-solving work, and point out that governments are starting to push academia in that direction. This is great, and to me, it raises the interesting question of optimal policy in rewarding research. That is supremely difficult, at least outside of the commercialisable. My understanding is that optimal policy would pay each researcher something like the marginal societal benefit of their work, summed globally and intertemporally forever. How on earth do you estimate that for the seminal New Keynesian model paper? Governments won’t come close, and (I imagine) will tend to focus on projects whose benefits can be more easily measured or otherwise justified. So we are back to the problem of misaligned researcher incentives. But surely a government push towards impact is a step in the right direction.
Until our civilisation solves that optimal policy problem, I think academia will continue to incentivise the pursuit of knowledge at least partly for knowledge’s sake. I wrote the post because understanding the implications of that has been useful to me.