Paul Krugman: evaluation

Transcript context

…For a budding research economist, would it, in fact, be the exact same advice? Oh yeah, except that what I would say is that at this point, don’t do what I did, which was very heavily theory-oriented, simple models, because there’s always a possibility of that, but now we are in this golden age of empirical work. The same advice that we used to give our grad students: Find facts and data that have not been heavily worked over, and look for anomalies or look for natural experiments that shed light on disputed issues. Go out there and look at the world. I suspect that stepping beyond traditional economic methodology is going to be productive in the years ahead. We just had the Rainwater Lecture here. We had a lecture from an ethnologist, who goes and talks to working-class fathers. I was blown away by . . . It’s a totally different research method from anything we do in economics, normally. It’s totally different and, of course, requires a degree of personal interaction with the subject you’re studying that I would find terrifying. But that made me think, “I wonder how many insights might we get by doing things in a way that’s very different from anything that’s now part of the standard economics research paradigm?” Paul Krugman, thank you very much.…

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