As typical for a journalist, my father didn't get quite right what I was saying about academia's interest in solving political problems today over lunch.
It's not so much that academics don't want to get their hands dirty dealing with contemporary issues, but that academics have a lot of theories about what causes big problems. Once they have their theories, they take a long time to gather careful data supporting that theory, and often find that there are many different interpretations of the data and subsequent policy implications.
More clearly, my hunch is that academics who study this stuff know enough to know there is no easy solution.
That said, I do agree with my dad that academics, and political scientists especially, need to be "more normatively focused" - meaning, they need to be careful that there painstaking, exhaustive work teaches us something about how things should work, and how to get there.
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