IN THIS EPISODE: Professor Heidi Williams, Professor Paul Niehaus, and Matt Clancy walk through academic, non-profit and private sector paths to research, the importance of your surroundings, and how you can find good use-inspired questions.
“Metascience 101” is a nine-episode set of interviews that doubles as a crash course in the debates, issues, and ideas driving the modern metascience movement. We investigate why building a genuine “science of science” matters, and how research in metascience is translating into real-world policy changes.
Episode Transcript
(Note: Episode transcripts have been lightly edited for clarity)
Caleb Watney: Welcome. This is the final episode of our Metascience 101 podcast series where we’ll turn to how you can get involved in metascience research. Professor Heidi Williams discusses career paths with innovation economist Matt Clancy and Professor Paul Niehaus. This episode touches on academic, non-profit, and private sector paths to research, the importance of your surroundings, and how you can find good, use-inspired questions.
Heidi Williams: Great. Our goal with this discussion is to give some advice to students and young people who might have listened to some of this series and are excited to get involved but are not exactly sure what that might look like, from a practical perspective.
On paper, the three of us here look similar in the sense that we all pursued PhDs in economics. I would guess that we each saw some value in the toolkit that the field of economics provides, to help us make progress on problems that we care about. Paul's and my career trajectories, on paper, look even more similar since we both finished our PhDs and went straight into academic jobs. In practice, however, each of the three of us actually took different paths that shaped how we thought about making progress on problems that we care about.
We all value interacting with people with a wide variety of skill sets. And we wanted to bring our perspectives to this discussion on these issues for young people.
Let’s start off with careers in government. Matt, after you finished your economics PhD, your first job was at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA. Tell us about opportunities to improve science from a public service perspective.
Matt Clancy: Sure. I worked for the Department of Agriculture, in the Economic Research Service (ERS) there. I was a research economist, and my government agency was unusual in that it was more like an academic department than many research departments in other agencies.
In other agencies, often you’re focusing on solving a problem for your agency’s stakeholders. For instance, if you work for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), you might literally be doing cost benefit analysis-type stuff. We were still trying to publish in academic journals, and, in that sense, that made us more similar to you in your careers.
But there are differences with academia. There, you’re aiming to publish research that you think is interesting, and that you hope your peers are going to find interesting from a pure knowledge standpoint. Our end goal was to help policymakers craft policy, and we tried to anticipate their information needs, because research takes years to play out. There was an entrepreneurial element where we needed to forecast out three to five years, “What are going to be the issues that are going to be important in agriculture?” We have to start researching and gathering data on those things now, so that we’ll be able to inform policy down the road.
In making policy decisions, sometimes we can't identify something very well, the data is not very good, or there's not a nice clean experiment. Yet a decision still has to be made. Some number has to be used to guide it, or else it's just based on intuition. That mindset gave me a different framework about the value of my research from the one I had when I started my PhD. I started asking, “What's the end point of doing this?” At USDA, we knew that somebody needed to make a decision, and we wanted to inform that decision with better information.
Heidi Williams: There are a lot of different agencies that people don't think about as intersecting with science policy, but they actually have very important inputs into a lot of the topics that were covered in this series of episodes.
To give one example, the Congressional Budget Office needs to tabulate the budget implications of basically every piece of legislation that comes through. They are asking questions like: What's the research and development investment budget, and how do we think about those implications? Or: What are the productivity implications of changes in high skilled immigration policy?
Those are questions that economists themselves research. When you're at a government agency, you might be tackling a very similar question, but with a specific consumer in mind. You’re thinking, “We expect that a given set of people in Congress is going to have these types of questions, and we're going to need to pull together research and synthesize the best available answer to that question.”
That's much more the motivation than simply the need to come up with curiosity-driven research questions. In agency work, you know what the research questions are, and you have a very direct connection to the consumer of your work. Is that one way that you would describe it?
Matt Clancy: At the Department of Agriculture, and at Census and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the box of acceptable research questions is definitely smaller than when you're at a university.
I went to university after this, and there you can do whatever you want. You don't have anybody over your shoulder checking in on you quarterly to see what research projects you're working on.
But within this still large box of research that we thought would be relevant to policymakers, we had a lot of scope to do research that interested us. At the end of the day, the American taxpayer is paying you, and they are trying to get something for it. That’s the ethos in these agencies rather than just seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake. You do have some autonomy, however.
Here’s a concrete example: on my first day, at the Department of Agriculture, they told me, “We need to know about the implications of restrictions on antibiotic use in agriculture. We think using them so much may cause antimicrobial resistance, and it could be a problem. There are going to be new restrictions on antibiotics.”
That's going to have knock-on effects on agriculture, because they don't use antibiotics just for fun but for a reason. They actually help the animals grow more quickly. If we're not going to let them use them for that purpose anymore, can we incentivize the drug agencies to develop other drugs that will have the same effect without this antimicrobial resistance? That kicked off a two-year project to understand the whole sector and the incentives, and to be able to give advice about what we should do.
I was given an objective with what we need to do. It still interested me as this new problem that I could sink my teeth into. The other half of the job evolved from hearing, “Matt, you just sort of have to figure out what to do.” At that time I thought, “There's all this patent data that we're not using to study innovation in agriculture; let's build a data set and start exploring questions about that.”
Paul Niehaus: This is dynamic, and new opportunities like this are opening up. They're in places like USDA ERS that are very long-established, and where it's understandable what a job there looks like. There are places like USAID, which is most related to what I do, where they've had a chief economist for a long time, but not really a chief economist office and team. Now, Dean Karlan is trying to build a culture of evidence-based decision making, and that may open up new opportunities as well. Those are some of the most exciting, new opportunities for stuff like this.
Heidi Williams: I agree. It seems like students thinking about careers in government can choose an agency whose mission you find really inspiring, as in “I'm really inspired by Sasha Gallant, and I want to go work at Development Innovation Ventures at USAID.” They do have entry-level jobs that can become an on-ramp to further work.
Or you can also match through fellowship programs that try to hit people at certain career stages and on ramp through them to more exposure to government. One that's very natural for PhDs is the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellowships, which gives you a direct placement in government, and there's often support for you to see more than one office. For people just out of undergrad, the Horizon Fellowship is another program that is very good about helping you find a placement, even if you're not currently in government. These fellowship programs can provide a natural way to on-ramp people into government and to find a good placement for their particular skill set.
The second category I want to talk about is what you can think of as academia-adjacent research jobs. There is economic research that is done outside of academia, and that is often, in the way that Matt was describing, more closely related to real-world problems. Think tanks are one natural place. Some private philanthropies like Open Philanthropy are doing research in a very directed way.
I would also put journalism tackling social problems in this category. I think of this as very closely adjacent to research. Something like the Vox Future Perfect Fellowships or public writing that's not necessarily attached to a given outlet, both are engaging in research on questions that you think are really important.
I'm curious if you each could each share an example of someone you've seen in that position. What are the pluses and minuses of that career track for people as a means of exposure to other career opportunities?
Paul Niehaus: The first thing that comes to mind is the global development space in the NGO world. There are certainly positions in the World Bank, which is a well established track, and some of the other big multilateral development banks. Many of the bigger NGOs, especially the ones that are more evidence focused, have a research function internally. The IRC has a great research team. At GiveDirectly, we have a research team. There are people there with PhDs who are doing great economics research that is very focused on the needs and questions of the NGO that they work at.
I typically see people go there a little bit later in their careers, after having done some academic work and reached a decision that they would like to shift the balance. They might think, “I want to be doing things that are going to have an immediate tangible impact, and where I'm confident that the questions I'm looking at are important questions, because they're coming to me from the rest of the team in the organization.” That's a great route.
Matt Clancy: Where I work now, Open Philanthropy, has a number of different people engaged in basically pure research positions. I'm actually a research fellow, although a portion of my duties is grantmaking. There are some people who do pure research. Though again here, it’s not purely curiosity driven.
There’s an instrumental objective, like say, “We're thinking of launching maybe a new program. There's an academic study that shows that the program was really effective. Can we dig into that study, replicate it, and make sure it's effective?” Other things are more open-ended, like learning about potential areas to fund. Sometimes it’s researching if there are tractable ways to make progress on those, if the problems are important, and if there is a valuable marginal dollar or whether that space is already saturated.
What you mentioned earlier about writing in public is an interesting, new path. The internet is a prominent way to network that we didn’t really have twenty years ago. It used to be that to network with people and find opportunities, you had to move to DC and meet the government policymakers at happy hours or different functions.
You can advertise what you're interested in on the internet as well. Writing a high-quality blog credibly signals, “This is what I'm interested in, and you can see my quality.” This may all break down with ChatGPT in the future. But that’s how I changed my career trajectory. I was in academia, working on the New Things Under The Sun project. That caught the attention of Caleb and Alec in the think-tank world, and that's how I began my collaboration with them.
Brian Potter was a construction engineer who was writing a super high-quality analysis of construction and asking why productivity in construction was not going up like other industries. Now, he’s joined the Institute for Progress too. I can think of other examples too. So if you're not in the job you want to be in, you're not in government, you don't work for a think-tank, one possible way to get attention is through the internet.
Paul Niehaus: I have seen that work also in the opposite direction. There was a remarkable civil servant in India, who had blogged about the latest research papers that were coming out. We all wondered, “Who is this gem of a human being?” Then we started talking to him to figure out what research we should be doing, because we really valued his opinion. He's gone on to work at Global Innovation Fund, funding research, among other things.
Matt Clancy: It can be a new kind of credential too, because for the right open-minded person, you can point to a voluminous documentation of your interest and expertise in the topic.
Heidi Williams: I really encourage students to spend time in government at some point, whether right out of undergrad, or while they're doing graduate work, because you can often get a much better sense of the relevant constraints and objectives of the institutions that you study, from spending time physically working in them.
But I know, from people that similarly spent even a short time in private sector firms, that they learn a lot too. “Wow, the way that I conceptualize how firms make decisions, what they see as the regulatory constraints, or how they think about their path for getting ideas out to have an impact on the world is very different from how I thought.” That then brings them back to research a different set of questions.
Do you think too few people see time in the private sector as something that they should do? Do people assume the private sector is a place that you go there to stay, and not to rotate in and out?
Paul Niehaus: That sort of rotation, once you've committed to an academic path, can be a little tricky, because if you're really full-time, what do you do? You ditch your co-authorship relationships and tell the editors that you're not going to do referee reports. It’s hard to unwind the web of commitments and obligations that you make in any one path, and really commit to another one.
But yes, 110%, there's incredible value in spending some time and exposure in the private sector. My own experiences, starting two companies and having to build things from the ground up, led to all kinds of painful, lived experiences and lessons learned that way.
The example that I give to my students, which I really love, is from Paul Oyer, your colleague at the business school at Stanford. Paul has this great job market paper, which shows that sales spike at the end of the fiscal year because salespeople want to make their quota.
This paper came about because he was sitting in grad school, and they were looking at some data on seasonality and sales, and there was a spike and, and everybody said, “Well, that's weird.” Then they just moved on.Paul said, “Well, that makes sense, because it's the salespeople making their quota,” because he had worked in sales right before going to grad school. Everybody said “No, no, no, that wouldn't make any sense.” He said, “I'm pretty sure that's what it is.”
So he wrote a great job market paper and got a great job out of it. It’s knowing how to interpret the things you're looking at, what sorts of things to look for, and not dismissing offhand things that seemed to not make sense from one mindset, because you've actually been out there in the world.
Heidi Williams: All three of us decided to go pursue a PhD in economics. If you were going to advise students on who should think about that path, what are the things that people often miss in thinking about this option as a path for having social impact with their work?
Paul Niehaus: The single biggest thing that I think people don't understand is that having a PhD is so flexible. Having a PhD and an academic job is such a platform, and people do such different things with it. Heidi, you're one of them, Matt, you were one of those people. I've done a whole diverse mix of things, including some research, but also starting a multinational NGO, and a couple of companies and lots of other things.
There are always trade-offs. But the first thing I want everybody to know is that a fundamental feature of the job is that you get to decide what to do with your time. If you want to get tenure, if you want to publish a lot of papers, that adds constraints. You have to think about how to do that, and what people are going to be responsive to. But that just gives you enormous freedom, right?
It also gives you a degree of security. When I'm doing entrepreneurial stuff, while I have this academic job, there's some risk here, but I know I can afford to take risks. If I want to express an unpopular opinion to a policymaker, I feel the freedom to do that, because I know that it's not going to cost me my job.
I think there is so much value to the platform aspect of it. But the key thing is that you need to envision it that way, not everybody is going to teach you to think of it that way.
Matt Clancy: I could imagine somebody who thinks, “I love research. I think I want to dig into these problems, but I don't want the academic life where I have to move all the time, and I have to do an extensive predoc, and then I have to jump through all these hoops, and then I'm racing to get tenure.”
That's one path, but that's not the path you have to necessarily take, like Paul said.
I went to Iowa State University, and I'm doing fine in my life. Most of the people in my cohort are also doing fine, teaching at small liberal arts colleges or in government. We didn't have to run through all the postdoc stuff. If the predoc and this tenuous life are not what you want, the key thing is to ask, do you actually still want to do a PhD? Do you want to learn all these skills? Do you want to spend years digging into a problem and trying to get to the bottom of it?
Paul Niehaus: Another thing that was really useful to me when I was deciding whether to do a PhD was a conversation where I was trying to decide whether to get into more of the “thinking" or the “doing” side of global development work. Somebody said to me, “It's a lot easier to get from the ‘thinking’ into the ‘doing’ than the other way around.” There's a lot of option value to that path.
That really bore out in my life, because I ended up getting into a bunch of “doing” opportunities based on things I was seeing in the research. I realized, “Oh, the research says this is a good idea, and no one's doing it. So I guess I'm going to do that.” I think it’s still broadly true that there are more options by getting the PhD first.
Heidi Williams: To echo this idea that came up, people often look at the average path of somebody that takes this route and decide that’s not what they would want, and I think that is not the right way to think about this. Just because the average person who's doing a PhD in economics is really stressed out about this unidimensional measure of success and has one career track in mind that would equal happiness — actually, a big feature of getting a PhD is that you get to choose what path you want.
If you see economics as a toolkit that would let you make an impact on the social problems that you want to study, I completely agree with Paul that the world is your oyster. You can choose the problem that you work on, you can choose the institution through which you work on that problem, and you can bring a really rigorous set of tools that might not otherwise be applied to that. I agree that it’s a very flexible platform.
Matt Clancy: Although I was saying with Iowa State University that I didn't do a predoc and take all this time, Heidi, you had a really good experience with your predoc. I’m not saying that you should avoid them.
Heidi Williams: Oftentimes the structures that a profession has sometimes get formalized as requirements, and then people do them because they're requirements. It would be better to think, “What would be something that I can do as an investment that would give me more information about whether this is a career path I want, and also give me more certainty about what area I want to go work in, if I do get a PhD?”
Straight out of undergrad, I was really lucky. I got a job with Michael Kremer, who's an amazing economist. I was working on a problem that was motivated by the very policy-relevant question, “How do we develop vaccines that are needed in low-income countries where it's not profitable for private firms to want to come develop them? But how do we bring the tools of economic theory to have contract theory papers written on the right contract that could actually incentivize private firms to do research on these problems that are socially important?”
There is this term that gets thrown around sometimes in the sciences called Pasteur’s quadrant. It’s use-inspired research. We know what the problem is that we need to solve, but you actually need to do the basic theory research in order to come up with the right solution.
My predoc was an incredibly rewarding experience. It made me think, “Oh, I absolutely want to go get a PhD.” It really honed my view of the area of research I wanted to work in.
But somehow the lesson comes out this way: “Oh, someone had a job like that, and then they got into graduate school. I need a job like that to go to grad school,” and then it becomes this box to check. When you're looking for these experiences, one important thing to think about is, “What am I getting out of this for my own development as a person, rather than thinking of it as a credentialing mechanism?”
It’s also really important to think about the impact that you can have by advising and teaching students. When you are an academic, you do your own research on problems that you think are important. But through your advising and teaching, you can also guide students towards working on those questions and support their work on those questions.
I don't know if either of you would like to share an example of that. For me, one of the main reasons why I have found it rewarding to stay in academia is providing this important source of value.
Paul Niehaus: The challenge of being individually productive is always interesting. You still find new problems to work on. But the challenge of creating a community around you — to have people who are collectively productive and creative and find good problems to work on — is so much more motivating.
Leadership in the academic sector looks different than leadership in the private sector. There you might get promoted through the ranks and at some point be doing strategy and bigger picture stuff. There isn't an obvious analog to that within the academy, but the kinds of mentorship and soft leadership that you can have by creating paths for younger researchers are exciting and rewarding as well.
Heidi Williams: Matt, Paul, and Tyler, who's here with us, each provide templates of mentorship. You can carve out ways to support people in academic research that I think are really great.
Paul Niehaus: Maybe this is segueing into things to think about if you do decide to do a PhD. But one thing that I do find very different in my academic versus non-academic experiences is that the non-academic experiences are intrinsically team efforts. You join a team, you're doing something together, everybody's all in. For many people, if it's a good team, and if the purpose you're working towards is something you care about, then that can be an incredibly fulfilling experience.
In the academy, that doesn't happen on its own. You have to be very intentional about finding the right people and putting those teams together and deciding what level of commitment you're ready to make to each other.
For people who came and ultimately left, the key factor for them was just not having found that team, and experiencing a very solitary exercise. They were sitting alone in their room with a whiteboard or with their laptop, and that was not what they were looking for professionally.
So if you choose this route, have this awareness that you're going to have to be much more intentional to have that experience of doing something important together.
Heidi Williams: If you do get a PhD, not because you want to be famous and publish papers in prestigious journals, but because you see this as a toolkit for making progress on problems that you care about — one thing that students may struggle with is that that's not the average reason why your peers are there. It may not be easy to find an advisor who empathizes with that being the reason that you're there.
Paul, you're one of the people that I think of as most thoughtful on this. How do you structure support for retaining your center of focus on what's most important to you, as opposed to what's most important to the institution and people around you?
Paul Niehaus: Within economics, I do think there has been a big shift in recent years. There was a time when a lot of people would feel very uncomfortable talking to advisors about any sort of “non-traditional” career path, say about a non-academic job that they might be interested in. There’s fairly broad acceptance that that is not good, and that departments should create a culture where you can talk about anything that you want to do and be supported. In many places, I think that is also increasingly the reality. We're not all the way there, but I feel optimistic about that.
It’s important to be intentional about creating and finding a community of people who are like-minded and supportive. Sometimes I feel like there’s this invisible divide between people who are there mainly because they are curious and they like to satisfy their curiosity, and people who are there because they believe that if they're thoughtful, they might be able to have a big impact on the world through what they do.
They're all wonderful people, and I don't dislike curious people, but the second group is my tribe. Finding those people and spending time with them is super fun and life-giving, and it also helps me when I have to make decisions about what I am going to prioritize. I know that within that community, certain things are respected and valued, even if they don't necessarily maximize the number of lines on your CV.
With my co-authors, we are very explicit and open with each other that what we're hoping to do is to improve anti-poverty policy in India, and that we're all comfortable with the fact that that may mean we don't publish as many papers, and that’s okay.
Heidi Williams: I want to talk about the fact that for many people, the institution where they spend time can have quite a substantive impact on what they value. Where you work can impact the way you think about what parts of your work are socially valuable, even in subtle ways.
If you get a PhD in economics, you can end up teaching in a business school, a public policy school, an economics department, or a public health school. There are lots of different academic jobs that you could have. People often think of it as, “Well, I'm going to take the best job that I get, in the microcolony of environments that’s most attractive to me.” But in my experience, those institutions can offer very different incentives for what kinds of things you work on.
Many economists who study innovation teach at business schools, and they end up teaching courses for MBAs. Many of the problems that they end up getting exposed to are problems relevant to private sector firms that are doing innovation.
There's also some alternative state of the world where all of the public policy schools recognize that innovation policy is a really important area, and everyone with my background is teaching masters of public policy students. And are then asking, “What do we need to train the next generation of policymakers that are going to really affect science and innovation policy?”
For some reason, that split happened, and most people like me teach at a business school, and in my view, that probably had a really large impact on what kinds of questions people study.
Matt, you can comment on some broader institutional differences across research in different environments. But even within academia, this is an issue that can really matter.
Matt Clancy: For much of my career, I don't think I appreciated how important your social environment is. When I applied to college, I got into University of Chicago and Iowa State University. I went to Iowa State University, because I thought, “Well, it's cheaper, and it's all physics.” I was going to major in physics. That's the end of my thinking about that. I didn't think about who my peers would be.
That probably would have made a difference, because in my subsequent experience, who my peers were did influence me quite a lot, such as working with USDA doing use-focused research. That deviated me from what I had thought of as the most valuable research when I was doing my PhD. When I came back to work at Iowa State University, somewhat by accident, I was given two office choices, and one was the Department of Economics and the other was the Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative Center, where I ended up taking an office because they were the ones who I thought it was good for me to be in the same building with.
I think the subsequent years were really different. I was surrounded by entrepreneurs and people who weren’t interested in talking about what my research was. But, they were trying to encourage students to start businesses and talking about these kinds of things. That affected what I viewed as a useful contribution that I could make as an academic, and I started New Things Under The Sun, a living literature review project, to try to make academic literature accessible to not only other academics, but also policymakers and these entrepreneurs are trying to start businesses.
The entrepreneurs often think that academic papers are too disconnected and irrelevant to their needs, because they're just lots of equations and 60 pages long. But I thought that there was a lot of value in the literature and started that project. I probably wouldn't have started it if I had been just across the street in the other department and been talking about my research projects all the time.
Then, I went to work for the Institute for Progress. Again, that was policy focused and policy relevant. Now, at Open Philanthropy, once again the most important research is viewed differently from academia.
I don't know for sure how easy it is to select into the right environment until you've tried it, maybe there's nothing better you can do than just sample. Be aware that the values of your peers is not the only way things can be. Do you guys have any thoughts on that?
Paul Niehaus: Over time, one thing I look for is the people to hang out with. Insights come along, and sometimes an insight is a great policy idea, or sometimes it's actually a better business idea, sometimes it's a better research idea. So I just love being with people who are flexible about that and happy to consider any of those possibilities, as opposed to people who are always looking for just one of those things. That flexibility in your intellectual peers is worth looking for.
Heidi Williams: It's also very rewarding to look for institutions that support that broad approach too. If you come up with a problem and think, “This would be socially valuable to do,” some institutions may say, “Well, we can't really support that, or that's not the work that we do.” But sometimes you match with an institution that says, “We agree that's high social value. Just find a way to make that happen.”
Or you meet people that have that mindset. Paul, you're a great example. You've been in academia, you've started a non-profit, you've started a for-profit. You think very flexibly about how to get a socially valuable idea out there. You don’t think, “You know, there's one specific tool that I have, and if this isn't there, you know, that's just an idea that's lost in history.”
The three of us have talked about institutions that are a little more narrowly focused. For instance, maybe for-profit spin outs could happen, but if it's an idea that's not profitable, it's discarded and never brought up. Or an organization like Open Philanthropy is trying to do a very focused research on one question, but along the way, they come upon other questions that they would like to know the answer to, but those aren't the current priority that they’re working on.
It would be great to find better ways of connecting those use-inspired questions that arise along the way. An individual institution might not have the time or interest to pursue them, but can we more publicly raise those as questions that will be useful for people that are in academia or in more flexible settings to pursue? I'm curious if you have any examples of that, that you would flag as productive case studies.
Paul Niehaus: I think it's about mindset and connective tissue. Organizational specialization is a good thing, and it’s important and productive. But I see this issue when I talk to my colleagues about the policy impact of their work.
One of my colleagues said to me, for example, “In Europe, there's this very well-established process where committees consume the latest research and it feeds into EU policymaking, but in the U.S., I just don't know what I'm doing.” Then, I call Heidi and say, “We need to get this guy connected to some people at Brookings, because we need connective tissue between the university and the sort of places in DC that are doing the hard work of translating this to make it legible to policymakers.”
To me, that was an example of one person working seamlessly with one set of institutions, and in another case, none of that connective tissue had been built and was clearly needed.
Matt Clancy: You said connective tissue. I've studied a lot of the economics of innovation. In the hard sciences, they have a direct connection to industry, because industry is building new technologies out of academic discoveries that are made, whether it's mRNA vaccines or rockets. In the social sciences, we haven't often had that. We haven't had organizations reading the latest social science research to figure out how to set up new products.
That's feedback that we have been missing, that is really healthy for the field, to just hear how your ideas play out in the real world. How theories work or don't work, replication, and validation of what we're doing. If it doesn't work, then that becomes generative of figuring out why. From a purely self-interested academic perspective, it’s really useful to create more of this circulation among different groups.
How do we find this connective tissue? You can take a sabbatical at a government agency, or you can sit on some of these joint advisory committees or something. But, the other thing you can do is try to find people like yourself, Heidi, the people who are in academia and engaging with a world that's wider.
Paul Niehaus: This happens but in a too idiosyncratic way. I make an effort to do this. I was talking to Heidi's colleague, Al Roth, a Nobel Laureate for market design. He has a weekly tea with his students, and occasionally an entrepreneur will write to him saying “Oh, I have this market design question related to this market I'm trying to build in my startup.” Al will say, “Come to tea and hang out with us.” Then one of the students may end up picking up that problem to work on it. These things happen, but now it's driven by individual people who make an effort to bridge the gap. The hope in the longer term is that we're going to see it more institutionalized.
Matt Clancy: There’s another virtue to online public writing. It’s accessible to people outside your audience. We've got a great system for communicating academic ideas to each other on the seminar circuits, conferences, these journals, within academia. But what if you want to reach people outside that bubble?
I hear from people all the time who read New Things Under The Sun who are practitioners or policymakers. We just meet for virtual coffee or Zoom to talk about some problem they're facing. They want to know if the academic literature has anything of value to say. I imagine that if more people had the time and space to communicate about their field in a way that is discoverable by people not in the field, then that'd be another way to build these connections.
Heidi Williams: As we wrap up, could you give a sales pitch to people who are motivated to use research to make progress on an important social problem? What's the case for them to go down that road, as opposed to doing something that is more direct service and less of this longer term path?
Matt Clancy: I'll take a shot. The best case is that you can think of knowledge creation and research as a lever that can have very long run impacts. If we can discover a marginally better way to do something, such as how we fund science or how we run peer review, then this evidence-based knowledge can spill out over the whole world.
One of the main values of knowledge is that it can be applied by everyone and it’s not trapped in any specific context. It’s non-rival. You can be exceptional at your role in direct service, but it's hard to extend your reach far. Research can go really far if it's done well and if it targets problems that matter. That's my pitch.
Paul Niehaus: I love it. I don't want to speak for science broadly — what do I know about many of the sciences? But Matt's point is that if there are things that are well-remunerated by the world, with the way the world is currently structured, there are going to be plenty of people to work on those problems. The problems that are going to be neglected, and therefore the ones where you're going to be able to have an outsized impact, are the ones that are creating these public goods. Knowledge that you can't capture all of the return and profit from it yourself — that's where the huge returns are going to be.
I think of this as a useful heuristic for myself. I try to find things that are not going to benefit me privately, precisely because that means they're likely undervalued and high impact. For economics in particular, I went into economics because to address the pressing issues of our time, I need to be able to think about human behavior quantitatively. I think that was a great heuristic and still is.
Matt Clancy: Compared to other social sciences, economics has a disproportionate policy impact. There are statistics about how often economists testify before Congress, and it's about twice the other social sciences all added together. So if you are going to pick a field where your goal is to have policy impact, economics is empirically really strong.
What about you, Heidi? What are your opinions about why people should do an economics PhD, if they want to have a positive impact?
Heidi Williams: It’s related to things that both of you touched on.
When you think about, “What do I want the scale of impact for my work to be?” I think it's really hard to think of that only in a direct sense. I’m somebody who really values my teaching and my direct advising. But at the end of the day, I want some substantial part of my work to be feeding into making systemic change. I want to be doing that in a way that's not just based on my own ideology and theory about what we should do as a society, but rather based on research that informs and gives me confidence that we can do something better than what we're doing right now.
Research plays such a unique role in honest advocacy for progress in a very directed way, and it’s a very rewarding life path. Academia is a place where you can have direct service of teaching, advising, and having individual relationships with students, and at the same time, you’re able to scale your impact through research that informs broader, more systematic change. I find this really rewarding.
Paul Niehaus: Just as a data point — although we're pretty clear-eyed about the constraints and limitations you sometimes face in academia, I would also say that we're having a blast.
Heidi Williams: Yes. On the right day, you will get me to tell you about how horrible academia is. But at the end of the day, I feel very happy with my job.
Matt Clancy: I would say you can get a PhD and do research and actually not be in academia. It is also possible.
Heidi Williams: You can be very happy.
Matt Clancy: Yes. That's right.
Heidi Williams: So good. I think that's a good note to wrap up on.
Matt Clancy: Thank you.
Caleb Watney: The Metascience 101 podcast series has come to a close, but our colleague Tim Hwang will continue releasing fascinating interviews about metascience on this podcast feed. So stay tuned!
You can find more information about the Macroscience newsletter at macroscience.org. You can learn more about the Institute for Progress and our metascience work at ifp.org, and if you have any questions about this series you can find our contact info there.
A special thanks to our colleagues Matt Esche, Santi Ruiz, and Tim Hwang for their help in producing this series. Thanks to all of our amazing experts who joined us for the workshop. Thanks to Stripe for hosting. Thanks to Prom Creative for editing. Thanks to you, the listener, for joining us for this Metascience 101 series.
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