Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…Tyler, both of us are at George Mason; you’ve been a professor there for more than 30 years. You’ve been involved in a lot of hiring decisions. It’s a strange place for more reasons than just that both of us are there. It’s a large state school, it’s newish. It’s not an Ivy League school, but it’s had an exceptional economics department. We’ve had a couple of Nobel laureates. We’ve had people like you. What is the secret sauce at George Mason that it manages to attract that kind of talent that other schools of comparable level are not able to? I like to look for people who believe something very strongly. That can’t be the only qualification, but other economics departments tend not to do that. They look for people who can execute flawless 90-page papers with every possible robustness check. Now, that too is important and useful, but it’s not what we do. If you decide you will specialize in people who believe in something and pursue it passionately and want to sit around and argue and talk ideas and read books, you will end up with one of the most interesting economics departments. We’ve built a sufficiently strong consensus that we just keep on hiring people who believe things. They turn out being a little wacky, but you’re selecting for that. That, in turn, keeps you different. How do you know how to screen for that? What’s the question you’re likely to ask at the AEA [American Economic Association] meetings that you know that someone is technically not unsound, but they’re also very interesting, and they can’t game it?…

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