Takahiro Hoshino: An Era Where Academic Knowledge Can Be Democratized

May 12, 2022

To tell you the truth, I'm a bit of a failure who gained quite a lot of weight due to a lack of exercise during the COVID-19 pandemic. After receiving the unwelcome diagnosis of fatty liver during my medical checkup at the end of 2020, I vowed at the start of 2021 that this would be the year I went on a diet.

So, what should I do? The internet is flooded with affiliate articles designed to sell specific products, and even health-related books and magazines are full of contradictory information regarding diet and exercise. In what is known as the principal-agent problem—where a principal (such as a shareholder or politician) delegates work to an agent (such as management or a bureaucrat)—it often becomes an issue when the agent prioritizes their own interests over those of the principal. If you give up on searching for correct knowledge yourself and become a passive consumer of information, you fall right into the hands of bloggers and authors motivated by advertising revenue or a desire for attention.

However, we now live in an era where it is possible to research academic knowledge to some extent on our own. For weight loss, there is a vast amount of research in the fields of sports science, nutrition, and health science, including "meta-analyses" that integrate results from multiple studies. Thanks to the open science movement, many papers are available for free. Furthermore, various translation sites can naturally translate English at the level used in meta-analyses. By finding and practicing exercise and dietary methods from academic sources that seemed sustainable and effective, I successfully lost 12 kilograms in a healthy manner by the end of last year.

Currently, I assist several government ministries and agencies with the planning and training for evidence-based policymaking (EBPM). In recent years, knowledge regarding policy effectiveness has been accumulating worldwide. For example, regarding the effectiveness of corporate subsidies, there are meta-analysis papers showing "which types of subsidies are most effective for which industries and company sizes in which countries." I am working to educate bureaucrats on the fact that such information is easily accessible. With academic knowledge becoming so accessible, I hope we move from an era where policies are decided simply because stakeholders shout the loudest—without any evaluation of their effects—to one where various forms of academic knowledge are mobilized right from the stage of selecting policy options.

What? You want to know what kind of diet I followed? Since I am not an expert in that field, I have no comment. More importantly, I want you to feel the spirit of this era by openly utilizing academic knowledge through your own research!