Hmm a long absence from the blogosphere.. and I'm trying to be back. Well what brings me back this time is none less than a Nobel laureate Dr. Paul Krugman. My friend Avinash Kishore Shahi did not find him interesting as a teacher ( for more log on to http://www.avinashkishoreshahi.wordpress.com) and the Nobel committee found him very exciting. They even lauded his teaching. That is not what brings me here.
What truly brings me here is the fact that he is a popular writer in the New York Times with a regular column where he criticises Mr. Bush and makes himself interesting to a Global audience. My interest has always been in doing work that connects to real lives of people and since the time is ripe i can take a dig, unlike the virtual finance world. Krugman does connect to a popular sentiment of the masses, even if most of the masses are not of the US, it would still be valid in an increasingly globalized world.
How many of us researchers ever try to take our work to the common man and make sense for him?
How many of us researchers want to place our work in popular literature so that a mass of people can benefit from it without our worrying about dissemination of our research and its findings.
How many of us researchers are confident that we can tackle the layman questions and show the connection with the real world of our research?
How many of us researchers are capable of not losing sight of the actual real life problem, we touch upon in our research ,in the maze of epistemology, validity, reliability, sampling design and so many other arguments and counter arguments?
How many of us are still excited about the problem we are trying to tackle when we are finishing our thesis and have not made the compromise of hitting a deadline cause it had to or altering the design or sample cause of some "practical" issues like operational funding etc.
I am not saying that i am beyond this or i have not done this or that but is it a more important question that our research is based on reality as it exists rather than a method proclaiming my religion of "good" "rigorous" "research". The vote is open now and we all have to cast our own vote . If relevance is achieved by compromising rigour (as many will vouch for relevance vs. rigour) why do we need rigour at all. If rigour is what is research is about (as many will vouch about purity of research again ) then why do we need to tell the implications and managerial implications or policy imperatives of our research at all. i guess its been long the research house needs to set the house in order. also i know this wont happen. Veblen had tried the same 110 years ago and we still live in the mess he had wanted to clear.
Amidst all this i wonder what Krugman does to this debate? apart form kick it up in my mind.
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