Doug Irwin: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the influence of Jagdish Bhagwati on you and your ideas? Very big impact. He was my thesis advisor. I took a number of courses with him at Columbia University. I learned two things from him. One, he made economics very fun. I don’t know whether you’ve ever talked to him, but he’s always telling jokes. He’s a great raconteur. He has great stories. He’s laughing a lot, and that came across in his class. Economics is a fun activity. It’s a fun discipline. It’s not just sterile theory. I try to bring that little bit of joy and levity to economics, the way I teach it and hopefully the way I write about it as well. The other thing I learned from him is marketing. This is back in the pre-internet era, pre-Twitter. We wrote a paper, when I was in graduate school. Not only was there a paper, but he got a New York Times column that we were allowed to write for the business section out of it. The Economist did a box on that article. He was a master at disseminating his work, not just to other academics, but to journalists, to public policy professionals, and things of that sort. That’s one thing that I’ve also internalized a bit as well. You just can’t write a paper, submit it to a working paper series, and then send it to journals. You have to market it a little bit. That’s much easier today, in the age of Twitter, but back then, that was considered something very unusual. What’s your connection with Randall Scott Kroszner, who teachers at the University of Chicago Business School?…

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