Asking Questions
Having the initiative to ask the question is often the most important part of thinking. That is true both for daily life and for scholarly work.
In daily life, if a person faces tasks A and B, where A is urgent and B is not, he should obviously do task A first. But some people never ask themselves which task is more urgent. If someone is thinking about borrowing money, he should ask himself what the probability is that he will become unemployed– but many people fail to think of doing that.
In scholarly work, often the most important innovation is to pose a new question. Solow asked what proportion of economic growth could be explained by increases in capital and labor, for example. Once you ask the question, it is relatively easy to find the answer. When I visited Chicago, asking short but big questions was the most noticeable talent of George Stigler and Gary Becker. They would floor a seminar speaker with a simple and ex-post-obvious question that he hadn’t thought about despite working on a paper for six months.