Glenn Loury: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now, when you meet promising young economists today in graduate school, is your first thought, “Oh, let the person stay on that path and be the next Roger Myerson?” Or do you a bit want to shake them and say, “Well, I want more of you to go the Glenn Loury way and be public intellectuals,” or some of the other things you’ve done? What’s your gut reaction to that? No, I don’t do that. I want them to get jobs. I want them to have a successful launch. I want to get them focused on the question and writing. Now, I must say I’m not advising very many graduate students these days and haven’t for some years now. But I want to get them focused on producing a dissertation that’s marketable, so I want them to ask a good question, and I want them to use rigorous methods appropriate to the high standards that we have. But these days, my kind of applied-theory life that I took up more or less successfully in the decade after I left graduate school is passé. Everybody is calibrating and estimating, and they’re looking for a natural experiment or a quasi-natural experiment or whatever it is. They’re doing the kind of empirical work that you can do now with the computing power that we have and the data availability and whatnot. The profession is completely different. I wouldn’t advise a young graduate student to follow in the path of writing papers like the papers that I wrote, because (a) they’re not going to get in the AER [American Economic Review], and (b) you want to get a job. You want to be able to sell yourself. I confess to being a little bit alienated from the profession these last years, especially as my public intellectual profile has risen. I don’t spend that much time worrying about what to tell graduate students. I don’t teach graduate students. I used to teach microeconomic theory to our first-year PhD students, but two years ago I stepped aside from that. We have eight theorists in our department, and the younger full professors weren’t able to get at the graduate students of the first year. There are eight of us, and there are only those two courses. I thought it was time for me to make room for some other people to teach theory to our graduate students. So, I’m not doing very much interacting with graduate students these days. What’s your favorite Thomas Schelling story?…

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