When Questions Become More Valuable Than Answers

On curiosity’s growing economic value

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One of the reasons I’ve always loved teaching is the shared exploration. The most rewarding moments weren’t when I had the answer, but when a student’s curiosity pulled us both into new territory. Meeting them where they are—the point of their own curiosity—was where the real growth happened.

For most of human history, answers were scarce.

If you had a question, you might live years—or a lifetime—without a satisfying answer.
“Mom, how does a television work?” For me, that question hung in the air for over a decade. Encyclopedias gave vague diagrams, but nothing that explained how electrons bent across a cathode ray tube to paint a moving image. I didn’t get a real answer until college physics.

Today? A seven-year-old could sit in front of ChatGPT and not only get the right answer in seconds, but one tailored to their level of understanding. The backlog of unanswered questions has evaporated.

For the first time in history, answers are abundant. What’s scarce now are questions.

The Economics of Curiosity

Economics teaches us that value accrues to scarcity. Oil was valuable in the industrial age, data in the digital age. Today, the scarce resource is curiosity.

• Answers are commodities. They’re fungible, tradable, instantly replicable.
• Questions are assets. Unique, differentiated, capable of producing alpha.

The economic value of curiosity lies in its ability to generate those non-commoditized assets. A single well-formed question can redirect research, reframe an industry, or unlock an entirely new business model.

Curiosity is not just a personality trait anymore. It’s a form of capital.

Categories of Questions

Think of humanity’s knowledge base like an expanding balance sheet:

1. Questions we don’t yet know to ask. (The invisible frontier.)
2. Questions we can ask but not yet answer. (The research frontier.)
3. Questions we’ve answered. (The growing library of human knowledge.)

In the past, most of the weight sat in #2. We had questions but not the capacity to answer them. Now, with AI, most factual questions leap straight from #2 to #3 in seconds. Which means the real frontier—the scarce and valuable space—is in category #1: the questions we haven’t thought to ask.

Why Institutions Resist Curiosity

Here’s the paradox: curiosity creates value, but it also destabilizes power.

• It asks why hierarchies exist.
• It stress-tests long-standing systems.
• It pulls at threads that some people would rather leave unpulled.

That’s why many institutions—schools, corporations, even governments—are built to stifle curiosity rather than foster it. Obedience scales more easily than wonder.

But in a world where AI does the obedient work better than humans, suppressing curiosity is no longer just shortsighted. It’s economically costly.

Return on Curiosity

Curiosity is one of the rare investments that compounds.

• Spend it, and you get more.
• Exercise it, and it grows stronger.
• Share it, and it multiplies.

Contrast that with most forms of capital, which deplete when used. Curiosity behaves more like compounding interest—the earlier and more often you engage it, the greater the payoff over time.

In my mentorship practice, I modeled this by asking students more questions than they asked me. For every one of their questions, I’d return two or three. It wasn’t about handing them answers, but about showing them how to walk the path of inquiry until it became second nature.

That’s the real return: not just answers to today’s problems, but the capacity to generate tomorrow’s.

This Week’s Challenge

If answers are cheap and curiosity is scarce, then the challenge is simple:
Practice asking better questions.

Here’s one exercise for the week:
Pick a subject you think you know well. Instead of explaining it, list ten questions about it that you don’t have answers for. Push past the obvious. Dig into the “why” and the “what if.”

Then, sit with those questions. Notice which ones spark energy. Those are your scarce assets.

Curiosity has always mattered. But only now, in an economy flooded with answers, does its true value become visible.

In markets, scarcity drives price.
In life, curiosity drives progress.

About the Author Matt Starolis is the founder of Engineering Confidence, a transformative mentorship practice built on over 3,000 hours of one-to-one mentorship and nearly 1,000 hours of AI-driven analysis. His work is dedicated to helping ambitious learners—and their families—build lives defined by clarity, resilience, and earned confidence.