I'm looking for reading suggestions on the following question:
If I have the goal of making a certain idea -- say, veganism, open borders, or whatever -- take hold in the population and if my means for achieving this goal consists in supporting academic work: how do I best go about? What's the theory of change where affecting academia is at the start of the causal chain and new beliefs/behaviour in the broader population are at the end of the causal chain?
I have an answer to a slightly different question: If you're an academic, how can you impact the world? This is something I thought about a lot when I was an economics PhD student.
Here are some ideas (mainly geared towards economics and especially microeconomics):
If you're a grad student altruistically looking to make an impact, and you're not trying to get a top-notch academic job, it may be especially productive to focus on the sort of work that the job market does not reward, since those topics may be under-studied.
Edit to add a couple more thoughts: A lot of academic economists advise policymakers directly -- for example, Jonathan Gruber had a lot of influence on the Affordable Care Act, and a handful of my Harvard economics professors had met with presidents. Additionally, I have a sense that think tanks are pretty influential, but I don't know anyone who works for one or exactly how that works.