What Should Economics Ask Next?

Choosing what to work on is one of the least formalized decisions in science. I study whether the local structure of past research helps screen which still-open questions are worth reading first. I build a directed literature graph from 242,595 published economics-facing papers from 1976 to 2026, rank open questions using only the literature available at each date, and test those rankings against which questions later enter published work. On realistic shortlists, graph-based screening outperforms ranking by popularity alone, and a second-stage model built on the same graph improves further. The gains differ across two broad kinds of question. Questions that deepen existing claims with clearer mechanisms produce more later realizations per inspected shortlist, while questions that close missing direct relations cover a larger share of the links the literature eventually adds. More broadly, the historical record suggests that economics more often adds mechanisms around existing claims than closes locally implied direct relations. The paper therefore contributes in two ways. Practically, it shows that local literature structure contains useful screening information. Descriptively, it uses that screen to characterize how economics more often moves.