My dissertation was a three-paper essay in which I examined baseball's arbitration system. At my dissertaion defense in 1998, my outside committee member asked me what my research could teach baseball team owners. My response, as I recall, was something on the order of "I think they have a pretty decent handle on the system by now (the system had been around since the early 70's). I'm just trying to understand it." Stephen Karlson clips from this interview with an architect:
Architects and city planners tend to be idealistic about the city; they're trying to understand what the city should be rather than what it is. And once they intellectually discover what they think it should be, they want to convince the rest of us that that's a good idea.
Economists, of course, are very different; they're just trying to understand the city. My economics-oriented friends who are doing research on the city are not trying to reshape it; they're just trying to understand what's going on. That's had an influence on me. It's made me less eager to jump in with solutions, and also more cognizant that in an economic system such as ours, what ordinary people want is very important. It may or may not be good for them; it may or may not be the best thing, or the most efficient thing. But if it's what they want, that counts an awful lot in an entrepreneurial economy such as ours.
I don't think I'd be a good policy economist since my advice to policy-makers would usually (not always) be something on the order of "It's probably best to largely leave people alone. Sure, people are fallible and they make mistakes (competition is largely trial and error), but they're pretty darned good at figuring out what they want and how to get it."
Addendum: Professor Karlson also notes in a later post:
Trade-offs frustrate policy makers also. Given a choice between two good things, their tendency is to want both.
Which reminds me of the following interchange I've heard many times in the past when going to a restaurant:
Wait staff member: "Would you like Coke or Pepsi?"
Customer: "Yes."
But, usually, folks in the trenches know their trade-offs the best.