Is Useless Business Research Immoral?

With millions of people around the world unemployed, hungry, and without hope, should business researchers have the luxury to dilly dally with research that has no practical benefits? Is doing so immoral?

A professor of mine recently described a table similar to the one below. The main difference is that I added a row for “useless” descriptive research and included some made up (but realistic) examples.

How do I define useless?

1) It doesn’t help improve firm performance

AND

2) It doesn’t add to our understanding of the world in a meaningful way.

OR

3) It has benefits but they are not realizable in any immediate or recognizable way.

		Theoretical	Applied
Descriptive	Useless or no reasonable short-term benefits	A theory of entrepreneurial aggressiveness	A survey of entrepreneurs eating habits
Descriptive	Practical or near term benefits	How to keep innovation culture from disappearing	A study of tax policy on entrepreneurial decision making
Normative		When/how can diversification improve firm performance?	Consulting type research

Now some would argue that there is no way to know what can be considered useful and thus any attempt to direct research toward more utilitarian outcomes is fool hardy.

I agree that it’s not possible to know what will ultimately be useful, but it’s generally not to difficult to ascertain what is questionable. And with so many critical problems that need answers or clarity, how can one defend research like “What do entrepreneurs eat?” , especially when such research can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to finish. I would rather err in mistakenly not funding what appears to be useless research but turns out not to be, then to not fund research that can make a clear case as to its utility. It could very well be that what appears to useful turns out not to be. But with people’s livelihoods and dreams dependent upon the growth of businesses should business researchers be allowed to indulge themselves in interesting, but remotely useful research, when there is no shortage of real problems?