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.
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.
62 years is NOT the age at which everyone retires in France, it's the minimal age to retire with *full pension* provided you've contributed *enough quarters* (2/7)
"Full pension" means 50% of your gross average salary over the entirety of your career—in most cases, a lot less than what you were earning each month before retiring (3/7)
2/ My wife @Vitolae & I have yet to find the way the German system provides flexibility by exception, but let me give you 2 examples of how the French bureaucracy works.
Example #1 is about dealing with someone behind a desk. At first, they’ll try to follow the rule and be rigid
3/ If, however, rigidity leads to an absurd/adverse situation you always have the option of being nice and polite and ask for an exception.
This will tap into the humanity of the bureaucrat in front of you, and they’ll usually find a way to make the system work for you.
2/ My job consisted in extracting technical information from German engineers to pass it on to French salespeople so that they could close deals with telcos on the French market.
As a result I belonged to 2 different chains of command: one in Germany, and the other in France.
3/ It was an interesting lesson in cross-cultural management and how German managers and French managers had very different views on working at night and on weekends.
0/ How politicians are messing up the vaccination campaign, creating frustration for doctors and citizens alike: the case of Germany 🇩🇪
[Thread 👇]
1/ My family and I live in Munich 🇩🇪
When @Vitolae and I (and our children) came here back in November, we had the impression of moving upward from a COVID-19 perspective—going from the worst places to the best (in Europe).
2/ We had left London 🇬🇧 in March 2020, in part because Britain seemed terribly unprepared to fight the nascent pandemic. I wrote about it here: europeanstraits.substack.com/p/household-fi…
1/ The goal of a capitalist enterprise is not to create jobs, but to pursue increasing returns to scale—which tend to bring marginal job creation down to 0.
In turn, it generates a surplus that can then be allocated to creating many jobs in less productive parts of the economy.
2/ It's not about trickle-down economics. I'm not talking about the fat cats getting richer and then creating jobs.
I'm talking about what a capitalist enterprise actually generates: that economic surplus, the amount of value created and captured by a scaling business.
3/ This massive value is then realized into wealth through many different channels:
• Salaries paid to workers
• Dividends and buybacks paid to shareholders
• Lower prices/higher quality offered to customers
• Products purchased from suppliers
• Taxes paid to government