Well, I think there is a very important to emphasize sort of complementarity where, you know, for any of these kind of really important questions about sort of, you know, how should science be organized or which kinds of policies generate the most economic growth or how one should support the diffusion of innovation or whatever, I don't think there exists kind of definitive data on that question. I don't think by sort of, you know, just going deep in the literature, you're going to come up with sort of clear answers that, you know, one can feel confident in going and executing or implementing. I think of the data such as it exists and the existing findings as kind of, know, food for hypothesis generation. And, you know, for example, you know, to kind of return to the management training one, like I would probably not have guessed the effect sizes would be that large, right? And so if those studies hadn't been conducted, I don't think I would have ascribed sort of particular, sufficient expectation value to the effort of maybe Stripe going and doing something there. But now because of those studies, I think, well, perhaps there are on the margins things we could do. Maybe there are things that end up being sort of quite materially valuable over time. I think being able to sort of marshal those, you know, potentially being able to sort of encourage people to dig more sort of in sort of particular directions, and then to, you know, combine that with a willingness to experiment and a willingness to, you know, frankly, just be wrong. I think kind of the synthesis of that is really powerful. And again, if you go back and you look at the foundations that I think have really had significant impact over the past 100, 200 years, I think it's that kind of combination. Weaver, who is the guy who is at Rockefeller, who funded Norman Borlaug, right? He'd worked with Vannevar Bush at OSRD during World War II. I think he was familiar with a lot of the data and just kind of empirical realities of how different kinds of scientific and technological ventures were likely to work, but he was also willing to just place a bold bet and pursue the hypothesis that agronomy could be radically improved. But there was no particularly strong basis ex ante to really have conviction in that. And so I think it's all in the combination. Yeah, interesting.

So, I mean, I'm curious to push further on one question. I mean, you asked me what I would want people to be studying. Why don't you think people are studying the cost questions as much as it seems like they should be? Or it seems like if these are as big of questions for society, and it certainly seems like they're issues that most people have, what are the structural barriers that are preventing the top people in these fields from deciding to go study it? Is it that the fields don't line up with it? Is that there's not funding for it? Is it too hard in certain ways? What are the dynamics that are going on here? There

are many big questions. It's hard to study them. So at the end, you have quite a speculative answer or set of hypotheses. So the world as a whole isn't sure what to make of that. Is it a real contribution? So the private return to you as a researcher maybe is unclear. So you tend to get very famous people who are quite well-established looking at really big ideas, maybe a bit later in their career. And I'm not saying that's bad work, but it's not necessarily cutting edge either. And they've spent their whole lives being famous, and they're not necessarily in a position to actually make the breakthrough. And then younger people, their incentive is to first get established and do something that is quite defensible. So I think in general, big questions are understudied. The tenure system, I think, increasingly is broken. A lot of academics do work pretty hard, but that so much of your audience is a narrowly defined set of peers who write you reference and tenure letters. I think we need to change. And the incentive for academics to integrate with practitioners and learn from them and actually try doing things. We need more of that. I've often suggested for graduate school, instead of taking a class, everyone should be sent to a not-so village for two weeks. They can do whatever they want. Just go for two weeks, think about things. No one wants to do this. No one wants to experiment with it. People who do development often do it on their own, but the notion that every economist should have studied the East Asian economic miracle, the industrial revolution, and spent two weeks or more in a poor village, it's just not how things are. And I'd like to change that. So

how does one go about changing that? So if you're trying to create a network of people who feel like they have an incentive to study this because it's going to be good for their career, right? And they have a network of supportive people who might be reviewing the grants or the work that they're doing and also think that this is important work to be done. How do you go about establishing that?

I can selfishly cite that at George Mason, virtually all of our students have very directly studied these questions, and we funded a lot of them to go live other distant, strange, possibly poor places. Other departments may have more money than we do. It can be done because we've done it at George Mason. So I think, again, it's a question of the will and just the ability and desire to imagine that things could be quite different in a sense that I think was more common in the America, say, of 1958 or JFK's decision to put a man on the moon than you see actually in 2019. All

right. Is that a good place to wrap? Fine

by me.

All right. Well, thank you, guys. This has been a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. All right.

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