Diane Coyle: The Puzzle of Economic Progress: "Do we know how economies develop? Obviously not, it seems, or otherwise every country would be doing better than it currently is in these low-growth times.... Yet when Patrick Collison of software infrastructure company Stripe and Tyler Cowen of George Mason University recently wrote an article in The Atlantic calling for a bold new interdisciplinary 'science of progress', they stirred up a flurry of righteous indignation among academics. Many pointed to the vast amount of academic and applied research that already addresses what Collison and Cowen propose to include in a new discipline.... Gina Neff... remarked... [that] the Industrial Revolution even gave birth to sociology, or what she called 'Progress Studies 1.0'. This is all true, and yet Collison and Cowen are on to something. Academic researchers clearly find it hard to work together across disciplinary boundaries, despite repeated calls for them to do so more often. This is largely the result of incentives that encourage academics to specialize....
Researchers need to distill their findings.... Most academics are poor communicators.... Today, the role of research in changing behavior–whether that of government officials or of businesses and citizens–is part of the broader crisis of legitimacy in Western democracies.... With real incomes stagnating for many, and “deaths of despair” increasing, it is not surprising that expertise has lost its luster for much of the public...
#noted
