What this is about: SBE 2020.
244 white papers in SBE available on the NSF site.
The white papers in Economics. Note that some of these papers are not available on the NSF site as they were submitted after their deadline, hence this is not really a subset of the earlier 244; moreover, more might be added at this link (I would not be surprised to count ultimately more here than the total number of papers on the NSF site, after all Econ work is never over— last bullet point).
(hat tip to Al Roth)
Agree that there seems to be a great amount of variation among those proposals, in ambition, idealism etc. Generally though– as you no doubt noticed– the authors are top people in their fields (okay, there are some exceptions), within the Economics discipline. Typically one should pay attention to what they have to say, for they have not gotten there out of the blue. But be skeptical and
I surely would not call all these "grand challenges". Why we should all agree that some personal views are priorities in economics research?<br />a Danish economist