Specialists should Also be Generalists: Discussion Paper

Should Priority Setting Also Be Concerned About Profound Socio-Economic Transformations? A Response to Recent Commentary

Task Assignments and Incentives: Generalists versus Specialists∗

I develop an agency model of job assignments where jobs differ based on the breadth of tasks. A tradeoff between task complementarities and relative abilities of workers results in those with balanced skills being assigned to multi-task jobs. The same tradeoff between complementarities and relative abilities also influences incentives to sort privately informed workers to jobs. I then draw on a...

Generalists vs Specialists in Indian Administration

For the policy-implementing part of his job, the administrator has to be a coordinator, which is a generalist function. At the policy-implementing stage, he needs to be a generalist in the sense of feeding extra-disciplinary valuejudgments, culled from his wide administrative experience, into the decision-making process. But, at the same time, for policyformulation he had to master specialised ...

criticism sould have to be scaled also publication should have to be valid

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Should we train scientific generalists?

I examine the topic of training scientific generalists. To focus the discussion, I propose the creation of a new graduate program, analogous in structure to existing MD/PhD programs, aimed at training a critical mass of scientific researchers with substantial intellectual breadth. In addition to completing the normal requirements for a PhD, students would undergo an intense, several year traini...