Dr. Yusuke Narita, Assistant Professor of Economics
LESSONS FROM A RESEARCHER
Written by Miyabi Shinki
Edited by Kelly Wu
Across the Pacific Ocean, Professor Yusuke Narita is a well-known Japanese television personality, trademarked for his funky square-and-circle-framed glasses. He appears on various television shows, where his unique takes on different topics have cemented his image as an amusing man. But beneath this playful persona lies a researcher with a nuanced journey that shapes who he is and his approach to research today.
After obtaining his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016, Professor. Narita set foot on Yale’s campus as a postdoc before beginning his role as an Assistant Professor of Economics the following year. His research involved deploying data-driven algorithms to analyze many different things: on the policy side, it was education and healthcare, and on the business side, it was the design of business products and services.
However, he was not a pure economist—or a researcher, even—from the start. Before his arrival to the US, Professor. Narita claims he was a “half-economist, half-applied mathematician.” At the University of Tokyo, he studied topics in economics primarily through techniques in applied math and statistics. He also explored a diverse assortment of subjects, including philosophy, psychology, history, and policy. The broader issues of human society—the design of political institutions, the model of democracy and capitalism in the 21st century—fascinated him, but the “chaotic bunch of abstract ideas,” as he calls it, were too chaotic to produce anything concrete.
Through his economics research at Yale, Professor Narita aims to tackle more tangible problems straightforwardly. He develops a method to approach or think about a broader system. Then, he takes the idea and applies it to a specific problem to devise a solution or verdict. Currently, he is working with a Japanese company, using a combination of their data and his methods to improve the allocation of digital books among their users based on reading preference.
In the past, Professor. Narita has worked with undergraduate students through the Tobin Center’s Research Assistantships (RA) program to collaborate on various research projects, such as evaluating the effectiveness of an algorithm to allocate funding to hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that specific project, his RA helped gather data, such as the number of patients accommodated by each hospital, cleaned it up, and converted the developed method (originally expressed in explicit mathematical notation) into something more suitable for data analysis.
Professor. Narita has also worked with graduate RAs, who have assisted him with research projects full-time. While undergrad students are, by nature, less equipped with skills and knowledge compared to graduate students, he views this trait as a virtue. As students gain more experience, they acquire a sense of which problems are likely to be solvable, discouraging them from making an authentic attempt at challenging tasks because they offer little return on time spent. This, he explains, is why younger people can produce more innovative things—and why it is important to maintain a young mindset when doing research.
Yet Professor Narita points out that unlike evaluating a healthcare policy or improving a business service, tangible results don’t need to be the goal. Just as an accountant tinkering with cells on a spreadsheet helps manage the world’s financial resources and an engineer drawing imaginary lines in a force diagram aids in constructing important infrastructure, a researcher contributes to society in convoluted and often unnoticed ways. A good researcher almost always investigates a narrowly defined problem that, from an outsider’s perspective, may seem disconnected from the real world. Thus, they need to detach themselves from any external cynicism and inattention and commit, almost single-mindedly, to the problem they are working to solve.
For Professor. Narita, detaching himself from the outside world has “kind of half-worked, but not really worked… [which is] why I’m splitting myself between this academic world and sort of the other world.” Following his vast academic and exploratory journey, he is gradually returning to his original motivation as a student—examining broader issues about political and economic institutions by exploring more diverse perspectives.
When I asked Professor Narita about the traits of a good researcher, he followed up with a clarifying question: “To be a successful researcher or more generally?” The definition of “successful” varies from person to person, but Professor Narita believes the most valuable trait in a researcher, is the “right amount of blindness” of the outside world.
For future researchers, he believes the most fundamentally important trait is the willingness to communicate. In past RA listings, Professor Narita preferred students with coursework and experience in specific fields, but he places equal value on the ability to engage in mutual communication. Knowledge, like how to code in a certain programming language, can be gained easily, especially given the abundance of online resources in today’s world—but a skill like communication, of effectively simulating what is going on in others’ brains and explaining ideas and thoughts accordingly, is much harder to learn.
Among the many interactions he has with his students, Professor. Narita shared that the most rewarding moments are when they tell him he’s wrong. The value of learning stems from pushing the boundary of human knowledge, and a good student and researcher approach learning with the understanding that what is considered to be true today may turn out to be incorrect tomorrow. Part of that is recognizing that there is always a possibility that a widely accepted notion, or someone knowledgeable and respected in a field, is completely wrong.
At the end of my interview with him, Professor. Narita shared “Forget everything I said. Don’t pay too much attention to what people tell you—listen to yourself.”