In the academic world, the emphasis is increasingly on specialization. Scholars in today's universities are encouraged to pursue research in ever-greater depth, which creates ever-narrower areas of expertise and reduces a scholar's opportunity to interact with colleagues and gain cross-disciplinary insights into different branches of learning. Since many of the world's scientific breakthroughs come when experts bring a fresh perspective to problems outside their own particular field (as historian Thomas Kuhn showed in his now-classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), this trend is particularly troubling.

By isolating branches of learning that are better considered together, scholars risk failing to recognize how problems intertwine and the ways in which this interconnection can amplify their effect. The academic world, for example, traditionally separates the study of agency problems (in which individuals promote their own interests over those of their employer) from that of cognitive science (which looks to explain human behavior). In the real world, however, agency problems and cognitive biases intermingle to create persistent difficulties in a variety of areas, such as capital allocation, where "corporate socialism" results in the misallocation of resources across business units; in compensation, where companies reward executives for being lucky; and in investment, where the...