On professions

What strikes me as odd in Serbia is that you won't find an economist who is an expert on education, or health, or anything else for that matter. You will hardly find a development economist, or a poverty economist. Topics are somehow split between industries! Economists predominantly deal with industry and macroeconomic stabilisation, sociologists work on poverty, psychologists on education and doctors on health. Consequentially, debates and different approaches to issues are frequently non-existent. Everyone sticks to "what they know best", and nobody crosses over to each other's field. There are no different points of view on an issue, beyond basic disagreements, I mean. In fact, whenever there is a debate, people take personal offense if you don't agree with them. Sometimes it seems that Serbian academia as well as body politic are all about not wanting to step on other people's toes.

I find this absence of erudite polemics a peculiar phenomenon. I guess it comes from the centralized and compartmentalized education system that we inherited from the socialist days, combined with people always needing others to stoke their egos. I wonder whether other countries face the same challenges...