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 Looking is Better Than Knowing

By Shlomo Maital  

          Goethe once said “Thinking is better than knowing —   but looking is best of all”.

           I am an economist.  Economists do a lot of thinking.  Based on their thinking, often couched in terms of mathematics, they do a lot of knowing.  But looking?  

           Ever since the economics profession opted for Leon Walras’ complex mathematics, over Alfred Marshall’s reality-based economics,  around 1880, economics has chosen mathematical elegance in place of reality.  “Elegance is for tailors”, MIT Economist Paul Samuelson once said, but he too leaned heavily on mathematics. 

           The peak of this economic fantasy was J.K. Galbraith’s 1967 book The New Industrial State.  In it, Galbraith described the new economics powered by huge industrial giants.  But he baldly stated, I have never been inside a factory.  Never.  Yet his book was a best-seller and was swallowed whole, by all.

            Economics today is different. It has at last embraced ‘looking’ in place of ‘thinking’, through behavioral economics, led by the massive influence of, get this, two psychologists, the late Amos Tversky and the late Daniel Kahneman.  Behavioral economics studies people and how they behave, in place of scribbling equations and pretending they describe reality.

              Until 2001, I was part of the ‘thinking’ fantasy brigade.  I took early retirement and went out to teach and study creativity, innovation and hi-tech.  I worked with large companies and small startups – and only then, began to understand the reality of innovation-driven economics.  I wrote a book, only after enlisting a former student who had made a brilliant career in advertising, built on innovation,   as co-author.

                 Here is how I would reinvent the way economists are trained.  I would adopt the MD/PhD model.  In this program, which exists at Harvard, Penn and Stanford,   students do a full medical degree, including an internship working on hospital wards, and at the time time, do a PhD, in which they learn to do research.  Together,  the life experience of treating sick patients and the rigorous training to do research,  leads to reality-based research that changes the world. 

               This is how I would train economics students today.  A rigorous training in research – and a lengthy internship in factories, and other places of work, to observe, befriend and work with real people. 

                Prof. Aaron Ciechanover, at my university Technion, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for identifying the protein, ubiquitin, that causes cells to die when they re no longer viable.  He holds an MD/PhD degree, and credits his clinical MD training for helping to make his research more anchoered, realistic and powerful.

                Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize in 2023, along with Penn colleague Katalin Koriko, for showing how mRNA could create effective vaccines – leading to the Pfizer/Moderna vaccine that saved 20 million lives.  Weissman is an MD and a PhD as well.  It is no coincidence.

                 It sounds very simple.  But looking should be a strong part of all academic training.  Not just thinking.  The scholars and creative people who change the world are almost all expert at looking.  Economics spent 150 years just thinking.  I think it led to disastrous policies.  We should be begging the world for forgiveness.