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10 Aug 09

Lucas roundtable: Ask the right questions | Free exchange | Economist.com

But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.

www.economist.com/...s_roundtable_ask_the_right.cfm - Preview

economics macroeconomic recession failure model questions modeling

  • We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.

    I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.

How to Save the World - How to Save the World? Ask the Right Questions

  • At
    a conference last year of some of the world's most renowned and
    experienced researchers, I asked the question: "What is the defining
    characteristic of great research?" The most impressive answer I heard
    had nothing to do with diligence, breadth or depth of work, or even
    analytical quality. It was:



    "It
    asks important questions."




    Note that it doesn't need to answer
    them. What makes a question important is that it is a gateway,
    a key,
    an avenue
    of exploration, a means of "just
    helping
    people get started    ".
    And that it is novel,
    not
    obvious     (except perhaps in
    hindsight), provocative,
    and insightful.



    That's a lot to ask of a question. But such questions are not only the
    key to great research, they are key to all sorts of doors that, in our
    world of imaginative poverty, would otherwise remain closed,
    unexamined. Doors such as:
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