In a good article about what caused the financial crisis, John Cassidy quotes an economist:
During the past few decades, much economic research has “tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability,” notes Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics who has also served on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee.
It isn’t just “the past few decades” and it isn’t just “much economic research,” it’s all academia. Thorstein Veblen made this point a hundred years ago in The Theory of the Leisure Class. Academics show their high status by doing useless research. Useful research is low status. When, as a professor, you see this in your own department — the uselessness of what people do — you think surely other departments are different. They aren’t. As a Berkeley grad student in engineering said to me, “95% of what goes on in Cory [Hall — where her department is] will never be used.”
Or they go beyond uselessness an into manipulation:
https://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.html
Just yesterday I was talking to someone who was asked to provide a biosketch for a grant application. This is an indispensable person, a programmer who holds many research projects together. But on the biosketch form he’s a zero: no publications, no presentations, no grants. He has decades of engineering experience, but that doesn’t fit on the form.
Ah, but define useful research. You mean industrial payoffs? Immediate commercial potential? How do you know the cure for AIDS isn’t coming from something people once called useless?
I remember considering this when I decided not to pursue a PHD in history (spending my life writing papers on an obscure moment of time for a small group of people doesn’t sound too appealing). I didn’t understand that in academia, this phenomenon extends to other fields.
Greg Mankiw (economics blogger) indirectly touched on this subject here:
https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2007/12/career-advice-from-david-brooks.html
“Define useful research.” Good question. I mean research that is clearly useful. The saving grace of the system is that research with no obvious use turns out to be useful in an unexpected way. And the less prestigious your position, the more you are willing to do useful research. That’s another way useful research gets done.
“Useful research” must have some possibility of telling you something you don’t already know.
Just came out of an academic workshop of tourism. All bullshit. They all show off and nothing is really useful