Irrational Economist_ Making Decisions in a Dangerous World - Erwann Michel-Kerjan [121]
REINVENTING OUR PROGRAMS
Ensuring that our ideas are implemented faithfully requires collaboration with practitioners—observing and addressing the issues that arise, as they try to make our ideas work. The greater our insight, the more it may lose in the translation, as practitioners struggle to understand and implement our novel concepts (see Ralph Keeney’s chapter in this book). Such a curse of insight can mean that the more we impress our colleagues, the harder it will be for practitioners to grasp our big ideas.
In addition to consuming our time and energies, such collaborations can cause discomfort, as practitioners assume ownership of our programs. Those practitioners may be enthusiasts, wanting to add their private stamp to our work, or they may be skeptics, stuck with our programs. Practitioners may need to make changes in our programs for change’s sake, in order to demonstrate their value to their organization. They may misunderstand our concepts, and inadvertently distort them. They may add vital elements that never occurred to us. They may just let our programs die, convinced that their organization wasn’t committed to them anyway. As these processes evolve, we will need to decide whether to assert or disclaim ownership, for programs that aren’t quite what we had in mind.
REINVENTING OUR INSTITUTIONS
I once heard the president of a Pittsburgh foundation say, “When historians look back at our era, they will wonder why our universities were so little engaged with the problems surrounding them.” Many contributors to this book have led in creating exceptions to that rule. For such exceptions to be sustainable, however, public service must be more than just an indulgence for tenured faculty.
Sustainable public service should be more likely when
1. We demonstrate that applications spawn interesting basic research, revealing new phenomena that complement ones that arise endogenously from normal disciplinary science. For that to happen, we must create research designs that domesticate these new phenomena, so that they can be studied by our colleagues who are more comfortable with normal science.
2. We change the currency of our disciplines, so that they accept the unconventional methods, collaborations, and products that applications require. For that to happen, we need to make the case that such work is unusually difficult—and not a refuge for those without the taste or talent for basic research.
3. We get our best students to pursue applications, for the intellectual challenge that they bring (and not for consulting fees or political influence). For that to happen, we need to get students with these tastes admitted to our programs, then effectively employed.
Sustainable change is likely to be maddeningly slow. People don’t change their work patterns very quickly. Arguably, they shouldn’t try, lest they lose the internal checks and balances that their disciplines have taught them. That is all the more reason for encouraging the kind of sustained, self-critical innovation that Howard Kunreuther has practiced throughout his career.
CHANGING THE TALK—AND PERHAPS THE WALK
Whereas changing how the world works might be our aspiration, our success depends on forces beyond our control, including organizational and electoral politics. Changing how the world talks, however, might be within our grasp, if we make our research accessible to people who might use its results. Communicating with nonspecialists requires listening, so that we provide relevant work in comprehensible terms. It may also require reining in our own natural enthusiasm. Outsiders have little way of knowing either the controversies