I see. It's a generic proposition, I think, that holds. The academic or
other students of a problem obviously understand its dimensions in a
theoretical sense long before he or she can actually lay out any
pragmatic way of solving it. And that explains the big gap between
academia and government or academia and business. We perform different
functions. But, if you study a problem carefully over a long period of
time and if you observe what is going on in the society, you can often
predict what's about to happen. You inevitably say if we would only do
this, it would not solve the problem necessarily, but it would lessen
its impact. It would help this group of people, the cost would be
thus-and-so and you can afford those costs, and so on. And I think that
does cut across different areas. The impracticality of some
academicians' solutions—political impracticality—gives academicians
rather a bad name. But they get a much worse name in their
recommendations for what business should do, because there is an even
bigger gap, as I see it, between academic economists' analyses and the
business sector's studies than between academic analysts and the
government because Business moves much faster; business can't study a
problem
Page 28 in the depth that academicians expect;
therefore, business solutions are never the perfect ones that the
economists want. Problem-solving takes place at different levels. There
is an idealized model-building solution technique which is what most
academicians engage in. There is, at the other extreme, the
seat-of-the-pants, the quick-and-dirty solution, which often is the only
one that can be used because, if you are having a flood today you don't
have time to worry about irrigation to prevent the next one. If you are
caught in an immediate crisis, the solutions call for speed, not
perfection. And then there is something in between when business tries
to get the best information it can but has to make a decision in fairly
short order, otherwise somebody else takes the market and RUNs away with
it. I guess if I had to express my strongest drawback, as I analyzed my
work in the Commerce Department, it is that I tended to be too academic.
I wanted to know more about the subject than I had time to learn. And
there were so many different problems all at once that I was frustrated
in trying to understand them better than the time allowed.