1/ @matthewclifford pointed to this ⤵️ in his last newsletter.
The reason for the misunderstanding here is that almost none of the relevant work that's done by academia is conveyed outside of the academic world, where it could make a difference in policymaking and business.
2/ You need a slow and complex process of digestion (by think tanks and journalists, mostly) for this work to be made available where it can be translated into action.
It's even harder in today's world where neither think tanks nor the media inspire trust anymore. Cc @mgurri
3/ At this point (where ideas translate into action), most of the original thinkers are missing in action: they even express contempt for those who dare use their ideas without the rigor and jargon that supposedly make intellectuel work so distinctive.
4/ The result is that it's often up to intellectual misfits to do the hard translation work: people that are somewhat looked down upon by both the theorists on one side, and the practitioners on the other.
This is why @billjaneway calls those the "theorist-practitioners".
5/ Those misfits' work is what inspires the idea of a missing discipline—that of "progress studies".
How come, people like @patrickc and @tylercowen rightfully ask, that nobody in the academic world is tackling those questions & problems on which theorist-practitioners focus?
6/ There are two explanations as to why it's not the case:
• Turning science into progress is bound to be in-between: neither thinking, nor action. If that's so, it will never be an intellectual discipline.
7/
• Or maybe it's just because we're in the middle of a paradigm shift, which means that the translation channels are broken and we need to reinvent the whole system.
There's an interesting precedent for that: The @sciencespo university in France, which dates back to 1875.
8/ Sciences Po was designed by Emile Boutmy, yet another misfit, who diagnosed that France's defeat against Prussia in 1870 was due to the German university's superiority over the French one—which was stuffy, backward-looking, and divided between ultra-specialized disciplines.
9/ Instead of transforming the academic system from the inside (you can't do that if you're a misfit, if at all), Boutmy decided to found a radically new university: one where the teaching would be done by practitioners and trans-disciplinary culture générale would be mandatory.
10/ Boutmy won his bet in a matter of decades: most of the French elite in the second half of the 20th century was trained at Sciences Po. In a way, what was taught at Sciences Po then was that discipline of progress that @patrickc and @tylercowen are longing for.
11/ I'm not sure it's still the case today. Being a university, Sciences Po has been forced (in no small part because of the Shanghai ranking) to comply with what supposedly makes a good university: more permanent faculty, mentions in obscure peer-reviewed publications, etc.
12/ In many respects, Sc Po has become as backward-looking as the FR university in the middle of the 19th century. You realize it witnessing how badly the French elite is currently performing as we're undergoing yet another techno-economic transition.
mailchi.mp/thefamily/fran…
13/ The same is happening all over the world. Members of the elite, including in academia, are constrained by the old categories, blinded by their own personal success, unable to understand the new paradigm and to come up with new ideas.
Read @mgurri ⤵️
thefifthwave.wordpress.com/2019/07/23/not…
14/ We're all waiting for the Boutmys of our time: those who will reinvent academia so as to make it relevant for the challenges of our time.
In the meantime, here's to all the misfits—those who have the most to teach us.
One of them is @timoreilly ⤵️
salon.thefamily.co/havent-you-rea…
15/ But many others belong to this group: @billjaneway @CarlotaPrzPerez Joe Studwell (author of "How Asia Works"—still not on Twitter!) @MazzucatoM W. Brian Arthur @noahsmith @tylercowen @delong @MacaesBruno @sovereignfund @mjmauboussin @roybahat and many others.
16/ Who would you add to the list?
Cc @LaureneTran12 @BesBalla @IanHathaway @jamescrabtree @kevinakwok
@LaureneTran12 @BesBalla @IanHathaway @jamescrabtree @kevinakwok 17/ And here's @matthewclifford's newsletter that started this chain of thoughts 🤗
getrevue.co/profile/mattcl…
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