One can dream up uncountable categories in any profession, of course, but among academics, and perhaps especially among economists, two types stand out for me: the athlete and the artist/entrepreneur.

Athletes want to be the best in whatever competition they perceive to be in. Rankings are all that matters: all admiration goes to those in the Top 3. Athletes have a strong sense of who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’: you want to associate with people who are ‘in’ because they publish in all the cool journals, go to the cool conferences and some of that coolness may someday rub off on you. Like real athletes, these academics choose their game, learn the rules, and try to be really good at it. Does this field require me to eschew interdisciplinary research, and prove difficult mathematical propositions? Then by heck I’m going to be the best at it. An athlete is another athlete’s competitor, first and foremost: if other athletes score he cringes his teeth in jealousy and swears to beat them in the next game.

Artists/entrepreneurs want to make a good product. A product is good if they themselves think it is good (the artist) or if it is good enough for a sufficient number of people (the entrepreneur). Artists/entrepreneurs don’t choose games or follow rules: they invent their own game, their own rules. When other scientists produce a great product, like a highly original paper, an artist/entrepreneur is eager to read it, and learn from it. Where athletes are driven by a constant comparison of themselves with others, artists/entrepreneurs are intrinsically motivated: they want to make something they themselves can be proud of.

Fiddle Tunes and IIFET

I have a lot more affinity with artists/entrepreneurs than with athletes – no surprises there. The current system in academia is largely geared towards athletes, with its emphasis on journal citation scores, H-index, and university rankings. This worries me. Athletes may be rule-followers, they are also more likely to cheat – just witness the doping scandals in bicycle racing and other sports. Rule-following also kills creativity – an essential ingredient of science.

I had plenty of opportunity to reflect on the importance of creativity and inventing your own rules in science in the past three weeks. The first week of July I was at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington. It was an overwhelming experience to immerse myself in the music and hospitality of all the folks at this beautiful spot on a peninsula at the Puget Sound. One of the highlights was an improvisation workshop by bluegrass fiddler Tatiana Hargreaves. I don’t want to give away too many details about what we did (perhaps to preserve the secret but actually just because the truth is too embarrassing), but an important lesson that scientists might want to draw from it is that to get out of your comfort zone you should not take yourself too seriously!

And then there was the conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET) in Seattle, in the third week of July. It was my second IIFET meeting but I’m sure it won’t be my last. One of the things I like about IIFET is its broadness, including not only economists but also policy scientists, sociologists, and people from NGOs and the fishing industry. Where the environmental economics conferences can feel like a gathering of athletes, IIFET is the place to go for artists/entrepreneurs. I was also excited to hear that 2020 will see the second edition of MSEAS, a conference on marine social-ecological systems, in Japan! The first edition, in Brest in 2016, yielded what must be the first comic in a peer-reviewed journal – another example of how art and science can make a happy marriage. More of that please!