A young economist, or an economics journalist interested in what the young are working on, could do a lot worse than reading through, as I did the other day, 55 very short papers written by distinguished economists describing the large questions they think are likely to dominate the next generation of research in their respective fields.

They are among 252 papers by experts in various disciplines who responded to an invitation by the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences  to describe “grand challenge questions” that transcend near-term funding cycles, questions which therefore might benefit from investment in infrastructure.