The Value to Being Merely a Practitioner

Everyone who reads Paul Romer’s The Trouble with Macroeconomics will have their own “6 blind men and the elephant” Capturemoment, not least those with the obvious and predictable agenda of calling to “junk the flawed economic models that make the world dangerous”.

This makes all the more valuable directly reading the paper itself.

For what it’s worth, I found most compelling the argument how valuable it can be for science to listen to knowledgeable, thoughtful, and responsible practitioners, those who just “want to put useful knowledge to work”, who can step outside the normal internal system of reward and punishment that a discipline imposes on its own.