Question
Are there domains where academia arguably lags the wider world, instead of leading?
Answer
Most of the humanities and liberal arts. Here practicing creatives make the raw material 2-3 decades before academia provides a meaningful account of it. Academics who try to stay on the edge are generally dismissed as populist/publicity seeking.
Partly understandable, because you cannot analyze a cultural text properly till it has diffused and had some sort of impact. For the minority of quantitatively oriented ones, there has to be data to study (number of Barbie dolls sold over several decades for example). But mainly it's risk aversion.
We also seem to be entering a sort of atemporal era for academic research, where there is no simple way to talk about a linear progression of intellectual development. It used to be a process that approximated a trunk-with-branches fairly well, but now that social evolution has fragmented drastically, the overall answer is that academia is ahead on some branches, well behind on others. When you go global, you get even more complexity.
And there are things that are simply not even studied by academia because they lack access. Xerox and similar companies know about 1000x more about copying and printing technologies than any engineering department anywhere. Lockheed and Boeing know 1000x more about advanced fighter design than any aerospace engineering professor. For these areas, academia contributes to progress by supplying occasional disruptions, not the primary vanguard of progress.
Partly understandable, because you cannot analyze a cultural text properly till it has diffused and had some sort of impact. For the minority of quantitatively oriented ones, there has to be data to study (number of Barbie dolls sold over several decades for example). But mainly it's risk aversion.
We also seem to be entering a sort of atemporal era for academic research, where there is no simple way to talk about a linear progression of intellectual development. It used to be a process that approximated a trunk-with-branches fairly well, but now that social evolution has fragmented drastically, the overall answer is that academia is ahead on some branches, well behind on others. When you go global, you get even more complexity.
And there are things that are simply not even studied by academia because they lack access. Xerox and similar companies know about 1000x more about copying and printing technologies than any engineering department anywhere. Lockheed and Boeing know 1000x more about advanced fighter design than any aerospace engineering professor. For these areas, academia contributes to progress by supplying occasional disruptions, not the primary vanguard of progress.