The Economy of Knowing

by Aishwarya Khanduja (Analogue Group) and Stuart Buck (Good Science Project)

For more than 80 years, economics has distinguished between microeconomics (how individual actors make decisions) and macroeconomics (how those decisions aggregate into large-scale patterns).1 This distinction has proven so valuable that we’ve forgotten how confusing economics was before it.

This micro/macro distinction enabled different methodologies, different types of evidence, and different policy levers. It revealed that what happens at the individual level can look very different when aggregated up to emergent, large-scale, societal patterns. Microeconomics and macroeconomics require different tools, ask different questions, and often reveal different truths.

Metascience needs the same clarity. Just as economics is about how incentives work in the marketplace for goods and services, metascience is about how incentives work in the marketplace for ideas and truth-seeking. And these incentives play out at the same micro- and macro-levels.

The Problem: Everything Is “Metascience”

Up to this point, “metascience” has been a broad and diffuse category, embracing everything from efforts to improve journal policies on preregistration, to large-scale analyses of citation patterns, to thought pieces on how NIH should change its grantmaking, to fraud detection and reproducibility studies, to ethnographies of labs, to launching new scientific organizations like Convergent Research or Speculative Technologies.

All of the above (and more!) has been lumped under one umbrella. This creates confusion about what metascience actually is, what methods it should use, and how different metascience efforts relate to each other. We’re trying to repair an epistemic economy without naming the fact that there is an economy, and that economies have both large-scale markets and individual minds.

Like financial economies, epistemic systems involve resource allocation (attention, funding, prestige), exchange mechanisms that create incentives (citations, collaborations), and trust (peer review, replication).

And like financial economies, individual rationality can produce collective irrationality. A scientist making the individually rational choice to avoid risky projects can contribute to a collectively irrational system where no one pursues breakthrough ideas.

To help clarify things, we should think of metascience at multiple levels, just like economics. If metascience were software, we’ve been trying to fix bugs in the user interface while ignoring the operating system—or vice versa. We need full-stack development.

The Distinction

Macro-metascience is about the political economy of funding, conducting, and publishing science at scale: the incentives, governance, institutions, funding mechanisms, and publication systems that make progress possible (or, in