Dani Rodrik: belief

Transcript context

…Last question before we turn to the audience. This, again, is getting back to your book. A reader wrote to me, “Rodrik was the Albert Hirschman professor at Princeton. Before that he received an Albert Hirschman Prize. Both Hirschman and Rodrik are economists who look at the same facts as everyone else but they see what nobody else has seen. If you were allowed to make one change in the economics profession or academia — ” this is an institutional change or rules change, not an attitudinal change, but an actual change in how things are done, a change in a graduate program. “If you could make one change to help produce more Dani Rodriks for all the rest of us, what would that be?” I wish I had a very quick and good answer to this but it’s not a great answer but it probably would help. I was helped a lot by going into economics after having done political science. I think a lot of what’s wrong in economics is that it’s so much driven by people who first do engineering or math before they go into economics. And so, it’s relatively late that they get immersed into the real world. I think anything that would get them a little bit more cognizant of the problems of the real world. I would say that there are parts of political science that have become even worse than economics right now. I’m not sure that that would work. I don’t know. Maybe a gap year, spending a year in a developing country between your first and second year? That’s actually my idea, as well. I’m glad to hear you say that.…

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