Episode 300: Wild Problems

Historically Thinking

Welcome to Episode 300 of Historically Thinking! Design theorists popularized the idea of “tame problems” and “wicked problems.” “Tame problems” are answers to questions like how to get to Chicago, or how to increase the battery life of a cell phone. As in mathematics and chess have clarity in their aims and their solutions. “Wicked problems” have neither clarity in their aims or in their solutions. But what about wild problems? By wild problems, my guest Russ Roberts refers to the problems of who to marry, whether to have children, where to move, how to forge a life well-lived. These are problems that can’t be solved by calculation; in fact, argues Roberts, they are in parts of life that are “outside the reach of science or the scientific mind.” But wild problems are not wicked problems, which are very nearly impossible to solve. Wild problems are the most important struggles of each and every life. They are also, not too surprisingly given the title, the subject of Roberts' most recent book Wild Problems: A Guide to the Decisions That Define Us. Russ Roberts is the President of Shalem College in Jerusalem, and John and Jean De Nault Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and host of the podcast EconTalk. This is his second appearance on Historically Thinking; he previously appeared in Episode 99, when we discussed his essay Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverse Incentives Caused the Financial Crisis, and what thinking through the 2008 financial crisis had taught him about intellectual humility. For Further Investigation To see if there is any editorial theme at work in this podcast, we suggest you listen to Episode 100 and to Episode 200, after finishing this one of course. Send notes! You might have noticed that Shalem College doesn't sound much like any college you know about in the United States. But you might also notice that it's beginning to seem that colleges in the United States increasingly resemble one another. Why might this be the case, and how we can do things differently, was the topic of an old conversation with David Staley in Episode 111: Alternative Universities, or, Thinking Way Outside the Box