Right, okay. I still think this is a bit of straw man. Professors don't generally claim to be an experts in local community access, so criticizing them for not being good at it doesn't help. Their focus is necessarily on publishing, and in making claims about access broadly that can be tested, or that can advance the field and be responded to, or cited.

"A grocery store on the corner of 24th and Main would help food access a lot and be quite successful" is not really a great research paper; but it is very useful to a business development person. "Food access is a significant problem in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas" is a fairly good research paper, but not something that you could ask the REAS in Community X to do for any area beyond Community X.

In the end, I think my question would be this. Let's take as true that Professors aren't all that accurate in their assessments of some issue, and that in their communities, REASs are more likely to be accurate in similar assessments. What then? How can we easily take that accurate, anecdotal REAS data, and turn it into broad comparative data that lets us better understand the problem nationwide?

The bank of course has much greater incentive to get their siting estimate right—but it’s hard for me to see how the bank-local REAS feedback loop would work in practice. There’s no ability to test a counterfactual, and local branch performance only becomes apparent years after the siting decision, and with many confounders.

In contrast if the professor’s paper a) actually gets noticed and b) the study conclusions are actually sensitive to the details of the distance estimation methodology, there’s a possibility (not guarantee) of someone writing a rebuttal in six months, which is embarrassing. B is important—spherical cows are frequently good enough!

Fundamentally, we shouldn’t be surprised that the methods appropriate for “decide where to spend $20M on a building” and “spend <$100k of researcher time to perform population-level analysis” should differ.

Even if you're right — I don't think you are, but even if you are — you're derailing your own point to indulge in petty sniping targeted at another profession. The aside makes the piece weaker because it detracts from the focus and makes you sound like a jerk. If I were your editor, I'd have struck out the entire aside about social scientists and compressed it to "as is often the case, the naïve method has problems, so what banks do instead is…"