Prof. David Surdam

Prof. David Surdam (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is Professor of Economics and David W. Wilson Business Ethics Fellow at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author of several books, including The Rise of the National Basketball Association (University of Illinois Press, 2012), Century of the Leisured Masses: Entertainment and the Transformation of Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 2015), Northern Naval Superiority and the Economics of the American Civil War (University of South Carolina Press, 2001), Run to Glory and Profits: The Economic Rise of the National Football League During the 1950’s (University of Nebraska Press, 2013).




 You've written a lot on the economic history of professional sports. To me, this seems like a dream job. Am I wrong?

I tell my students that they should try to choose a topic they are keenly interested in. As a child, I was interested in the Civil War (a National Geographic article on the centennial of Gettysburg and Vicksburg sparked my interest), sports (my brother was a star on the high school state championship basketball team), and television (my sister and I watched for hours). To do history, you must be prepared to sit in front of microfilm machines; handle musty, deteriorating manuscripts; and spend time in the stacks of various libraries. On the other hand, you meet pretty cool people--the library archivists and reference people.

I rather doubt that most young economists enjoy their research as much as I do, since they are often working on topics chosen by their dissertation advisors, and they are too busy trying to demonstrate their mathematical abilities.

Economists, though, should view themselves as storytellers. There's a lot of stories in revolving around the Civil War, baseball, and television.

You studied under a Nobel Prize winner in graduate school, and since you were at the University of Chicago, I guess you may have occasionally run into other winners. Was there anything especially interesting or surprising you observed about such prominent figures in the field? Did they have anything in common, apart from being very smart?

Well, I was fortunate in that Robert W. Fogel won his Nobel Prize a year before I completed my dissertation. One of the first things he told me was that he would make sure to make time to work with on the final stages of my dissertation. Winning a Nobel Prize creates a lot of distractions, although most of the U-Chicago Nobel Prize winners went back to work after the interviews; some rushed off to teach after the initial hoopla. Fogel mentioned that what set the Nobel Prize winners apart wasn't their smarts; being smart was simply a pre-requisite, and there were plenty of smart people around. What set the Nobel Prize winners apart was their dedication and their passion for learning and thinking. The graduate students heard a possibly apocryphal story that one of the Nobel Prize winners once said he liked coming into his office on Christmas because, "It was the one day of the year that his phone didn't ring."

The funny thing about being in a department with multiple Nobel Prize winners is that it is no big deal among them. Unless they become polemicists for the New York Times, most Nobel Prize-winning economists are anonymous. I once walked past the Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House in Hyde Park (U-Chicago campus) and saw Gary Becker, another Nobel Prize winner, walking up the street.  A tour bus had just deposited a crowd of gawkers. None of them paid Becker--arguably one of the most influential economists of the second half of the twentieth century--any mind. I felt tempted to yell, "Look, there goes a Nobel Prize winner." Of course, out of respect for Professor Becker, I did not.

What's the worst advice you ever got as you were thinking about becoming an economist?

People didn't advise me with regard to becoming an economist. My Dad, who had a college degree, used to make fun of PhDs, but he quit joking about them, when I went off to graduate school. My high school accounting teacher was always sorry that I didn't become a CPA. In retrospect, my comparative advantage probably was in accounting, but I enjoy being an economist. The joke, "An economist is someone lacking the personality to be an accountant," is pretty funny, as it takes a swipe at both professions. 

I suppose it would have been nice for a professor to give us some punchlines to the ubiquitous query, "What's the economy going to do?" Strangers often ask me that question, when they first meet me. I honestly have no idea what the economy is going to do; I don't study that. I have fancy theories and terminology to toss around, but I have little clue. I think people don't believe me, when I tell them I don't know. They seem to think I'm keeping potentially lucrative information secret. If you look at most economists' investment portfolios, I doubt you'd see a significant advantage over the general, college-educated crowd.

Prof. Peter Leeson

Prof. Peter Leeson (Ph.D., George Mason University) is  the Duncan Black Professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University. Formerly, Professor Leeson was a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, a Visiting Fellow in Political Economy and Government at Harvard University, and the F. A. Hayek Fellow at the London School of Economics.



In the preface of your 2009 book on piracy (The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, Princeton University Press), you asked your girlfriend to marry you. That’s a risk that most people wouldn’t take. Were there any economic principles at work in taking such an unusual approach to that decision (consciously at the time or now looking back after a few years)?

There are economic principles at work in taking every decision! The one guiding that decision: Of the proposal alternatives then available to me, which one would Ania appreciate the most – maximize her “proposal profit”? I think I got pretty close, and we’ll have been enjoying the returns for nine years come this spring.

Your just-published book (WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird, Stanford University Press) highlights many superstitious practices and their rational economic effects. Many people would think of superstitions as inherently irrational. Should we re-define “superstition” in light of your findings?

How about we redefine “irrational” instead? Something like this, “The pervasive, false belief according to which people do not always pursue their goals as best they can given their limitations and the limitations of their environment. See also, superstition.”

If I’d like to become an economist, what’s the biggest mistake I should avoid?

Don’t confuse economics with the technical tools often used by economists – or with psychology. Also, don’t confuse a counterfeit Cohiba Behike with the real thing: the former tastes like crap and won’t do anything for you; the latter is sublime and will (in a few years, my young friend!) make you a better economist.

Prof. Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Ph.D., Harvard University) taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2000 to 2015 in economics, history, English, and communication. She has written 17 books and around 400 scholarly pieces on topics ranging from technical economics and statistical theory to transgender advocacy and the ethics of the bourgeois virtues. She is known as a “conservative” economist, Chicago-School style (she taught at the University of Chicago from 1968 to 1980), but protests, “I’m a literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian libertarian.” The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and honorary degrees from universities in five different countries, Prof. McCloskey's latest book is Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

 


In your short article from 1992 titled “The Natural,” you wrote about the difficulty of teaching economics to undergraduates, due to the tendency to treat them as if they learned the subject easily, instead of making them push through all the difficulties of understanding the subject carefully. Has anything happened to change your views in the past 25 years?

​No, because it's not about how hard they work, but about certain personality types or family backgrounds grasp the subject easier, naturally. It's like having a good arm for pitching a baseball, the term "a natural" coming from baseball talk. Some people see arguments from self-interest easier because they run their own lives on self-interest. And others, whether or not they have that (rather common) personality, grow up in small business or farms in which they learn the importance of price incentives and the results of chores and so forth in a way that a student does not who grows up in a household detached from the market (Mom and Dad "go to the office" to make their income, which is mysterious in a way that helping your father plow the back 40 is not)​.

You have written seventeen books and hundreds of scholarly articles in your long and productive career. Is there any one thing in your previous writing about economics that you would drastically change?

​Yes. When I was a young professor I was certain that (1) people were motivated by profit only and (2) only quantitative evidence was real evidence. Without throwing out what can be learned from watching the profit and measuring things, I have grown to see that (1) and (2) are mistaken.​

Prof. David Berri

David Berri (Ph.D., Colorado State University) is professor of economics at Southern Utah University. He is the co-author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport (Stanford University Press, 2006) and Stumbling on Wins: Two Economists Explore the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports (Financial Times Press, 2010). In addition, he is the sole author of Sports Economics (a textbook forthcoming in 2018 from Macmillan). Prof. Berri has published more than fifty academic papers on such topics as the evaluation of players and coaches, competitive balance, the drafting of players, labor disputes, the NCAA, and gender issues in sports. He has also written on sports economics for a number of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, theAtlantic.com, and Time.com.

As an economist, how do you think the NBA or other sports will change in the near or distant future in ways people might not expect? 

Sports tend to be a realm dominated by men.  But more than 3 million girls play high school sports in the United States while more than 200,000 women play sports in college.  In addition, a recent Gallup poll indicated that 51% of women consider themselves sports fans.  So there are more than 60 million women who follow sports.

So the big change I think we will see in all sports is the increasing participation of women.  Men tend to think sports is their world.  But women very much like sports.  And in the future, the economics of sports is going to reflect this fact.  We will see more and more women playing sports and more and more women talking about sports.

Many men are not expecting this change.  But as the 21^st century proceeds, this is the change we are going to see in sports.
 
You have written a lot on the economic aspects of sports. Is the "sports + economics" niche full, or is there room for more people to work in this area? 

Sports economics -- like many "niche" fields in economics -- is far from saturated.  One issue is that many economists outside the field may not take work in this area as serious as they should.  But I sense this is true of many niche fields. 

Sports, though, provides an incredible data set to study human behavior.  So there are so many important issues one can examine in sports economics.  And these are often hard to study outside of sports.  Such topics as gender, race, managerial decision-making, and worker exploitation are but a sample of the issues that one can investigate in sports economics.

What's the best advice you ever got as you were thinking about becoming an economist?

More than a century ago, Alfred Marshall emphasized that economics “is not a body of concrete truth, but an engine for the discovery of concrete truth."  I think this one sentence should be remembered by anyone who wants to study economics.  Many treat economics as less of a science and more like a religion.  They cling to the idea that human beings are perfectly rational, markets are always good, and government doesn’t help.

You should approach economics with an understanding that the answer is often “it depends”.  Sometimes markets are a good idea.  Sometimes they are not. Sometimes government doesn’t help. Sometimes it definitely does.  One answer to all questions doesn’t exist. 

So you need to approach economics with an open-mind.  We don’t know the answer to our research questions until we do the research.  Often we are surprised by what we find.

Prof. Jillian Carr

Prof. Jillian B. Carr (Ph.D., Texas A&M) is an Assistant Professor of Economics in the Krannert School of Management at Purdue University. Her fields are applied microeconomics and labor economics, and her current research is on the economics of crime, urban economics and law and economics. She is a research affiliate with the Purdue University Research Center in Economics, the Justice Tech Lab, and the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.

You went to a small liberal arts college [Rhodes College, approx. 2000 students]. What are the advantages and disadvantages of going to a small liberal arts college when you plan to go to grad school in economics?

I think I’m in a unique position to answer this having just spent 8 years post-Rhodes at large state schools, so I guess my responses are relative to those. I think that comparing to an elite private school is probably different, too. 

I can’t say for sure that I would have decided to pursue my PhD at all if it wasn’t for the mentorship and motivation that I got from faculty at Rhodes. They really inspired me to consider becoming an academic, specifically. I thought that I wanted to work in government policy, and that the only way to do that was to work for the government or a think tank. I do work on government policy now in my research, but I like having the ability to study what I want how I want instead of focusing on the questions that the government or my agency prioritizes. [My professors] always seemed like they were having fun, so I thought that teaching could be enjoyable, too (and it is!)

There’s also a bit of hubris required to embark on a PhD, and I think that the experience of attending a liberal arts school helped to stoke that in me. If I had been in some of the classes I teach (400-level Public Economics with >30 students) I’m not sure I would have considered myself exceptional enough to take on the challenge. I think that the small classes and personal attention from faculty instill the confidence you need to get started down that path.

Also, there’s just better quality control on the classes you take. Almost every class I took at Rhodes was exceptional, and they were all taught by faculty (as opposed to grad students). That’s really huge. You need a solid foundation. 

The main disadvantage is name recognition, especially if you go somewhere less well-known. . . . For example, [another Rhodes student] went to Texas A&M for her PhD before me, and I basically got in because they liked her so much. Then, more Rhodes students got into Texas A&M because they liked both of us. It’s just harder to signal that you are a high-quality candidate (particularly for applying to grad schools) if someone doesn’t know your institution.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist or that you would recommend to aspiring economists?

The main one for me was Freakonomics. I always cared about human behavior and societal institutions, but I liked the rigor of the economics framework (theoretically and then empirically). When I read that book, I thought “Yep, those are the questions that interest me and the methods I want to use.” 

Other than that, I recommend anything that interests you (I’d go so far as to include TV shows here, too). I work in the economics of crime and poverty, so I read lots of non-economics books and articles because I’m interested in the topics. Sometimes I have ideas for research while I’m reading these things.

What is the worst advice that you have ever been given about becoming an economist?

“Only the work matters.” (By work, I mean whatever the current “output” is – grades, publications, etc.) In truth, everything matters. I say that not to scare you, but to encourage you that being a well-rounded interesting person (who does things like blog!) also matters. Who you know also matters (a lot). Be yourself, do interesting things and meet interesting people. You’ll be happier and likely more successful.

Prof. David Henderson

Prof. David Henderson (Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles) is a Professor of Economics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He is the editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (2007) and served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. He blogs at EconLog.




When you try to write about economics for a general audience, are there particular concepts that are especially difficult to communicate?

Yes. Just offhand, deadweight loss from taxes and thinking on the margin. Or maybe I should say that they’re easy to communicate, but harder for people to understand and integrate into their thinking. On thinking on the margin, I think of it as a partial derivative in calculus. You hold everything else constant and see what changes when one variable changes. But most of my students have never really mastered calculus. 

You are originally from Canada. Have you noted any differences in how economics is taught in Canada and the United States?

Hmmm. That’s hard to answer. Remember that the last time I experienced how economics is taught in Canada was in 1971-72 at the University of Western Ontario in London. (I think it’s now called Western University.) So my info is dated. But just talking to people I run into at conferences, my best guess is that it’s not substantially different. I should point out also, though, that I got my Ph.D. at UCLA and that not only was economics taught differently there than in Canada, but also it was taught differently there than in almost the whole rest of the United States. No one taught the way Armen Alchian did: puzzling through a problem, putting almost nothing on the board, thinking in words, not math and not even graphs. He was the person who convinced me that you can think rigorously in words. He has still affected my teaching 40+ years later.

 

Is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged a good book to introduce high schoolers to economics, or are there others you would recommend?

 

Yes. I think it’s a good book to introduce high schoolers to a few things: (1) why “making money” is productive if done in a non-coercive way, (2) the idea of rent-seeking or, more accurately, privilege seeking, (3) the complex ways that various sectors of an economy interact, and (3) the unintended, and often tragic, consequences of government intervention. I highly recommend Henry Hazlitt’s 1946 book, still relevant, Economics in One Lesson. I first read it when I was about 17 or 18 and it opened my eyes. That was after having read Atlas Shrugged.

Prof. Peter Temin

Prof. Peter Temin (Ph.D., M.I.T.) is the Elisha Gray II Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Massachusets Institute of Technology. His books include The New Economic History (1972), Lessons From the Great Depression (1989), and The Roman Market Economy (2013).

You have written a lot about the economics of the Roman Empire. Were you interested in Rome or economics first, and what brought these two into contact?

I read Moses Finley's book, The Ancient Economy (1973) and been disappointed with the level of economic analysis in it, but I did not start to write about the ancient economy until many decades later.  I hope that my work on ancient economies has enabled others to go further in that field than I could.

What changes have you seen in how economics is taught since you were a student?

Economics now is taught with much more sophisticated mathematics than when I was a student.  This has led to better econometrics and microeconomics, but it has not helped much in macroeconomics.  That is why I wrote a small book on Keynesian economics a few years ago.  And my latest book, The Vanishing Middle Class (2017), is based on a simple model of economic development.

Prof. Josh Hendrickson

Josh Hendrickson (Ph.D., Wayne State University) is Associate Proffessor of Economics at Ole Miss University. He blogs at everydayecon.wordpress.com.


 
What made you decide to blog about economics when there are so many other blogs already?

I decided to start blogging back when I was in graduate school. There were not as many blogs then as there are now. I saw it as a way to interact with economists and work out my ideas. Writing not only forces you to think carefully about ideas, but also to learn how to present those ideas clearly (I don't pretend that my presentation is always clear, but I like to think I'm asymptotically approaching clarity!). Economics is less about what to think and more about how to think. To learn economics, you need to really engage with the ideas. Writing is a great way to do that. So, in other words, I started blogging out of self-interest. I'll let others decide whether this was Adam Smith's invisible hand at work.

You’ve written about Bitcoin and other forms of online monetary transfer; do you think economists have paid too little attention to it or is it a passing fad?

I'm fascinated with bitcoin. Anyone who is a monetary economist should be excited about bitcoin because cryptocurrency poses a number of theoretical questions and will also provide evidence regarding existing monetary theories. To me, I think too much of the focus to this point has been on whether or not bitcoin can overtake existing currencies -- and people have very strong opinions on this. I think the technology itself has the potential to change the way we do a lot of different things. I also think that right now, as a currency, cryptocurrencies likely have the most to offer to those in developing countries with poor financial institutions and untrustworthy governments than the developed world. This raises a lot of political economy questions as well. As far as my overall opinion, I have no idea if this is a fad or a revolutionary idea, but I'm excited to watch things play out. This is about as close to a natural experiment as we get in monetary economics!

Prof. Angela Dills

Angela Dills (Ph.D., Boston University), is Professor of Economics and Gimelstob-Landry Distinguished Professor for Regional Economic Development at Western Carolina University. Her research interests are in public economics and labor economics,  with special interests in the economics of education, crime, and health. She has received many awards for her teachng, including the National Council on Economic Education and the Excellence in Research Reward from the WCU College of Business.



What concepts are most difficult for economics students to grasp?

Comparative advantage is frequently a difficult concept for students to grasp. Students typically can figure out how to calculate opportunity cost for a given person or country. But to also change some students' intuition about trade between two people as being exploitative for the weaker person can take more effort. In a related vein, when we discuss supply and demand and market competition, many students enter the course thinking that a producers' goal is to sell more output than their competition; convincing them that the optimal choice is to do the best the producer can (profit maximize) instead of trying to do better than someone else (market share maximize) can go against their existing beliefs.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist? 

I love to read but, reflecting on your question, cannot point to a specific book that was important to me in my work as an economist. I enjoy reading pop-economics books (Freakonomics, Naked Economics, and the like), particularly as an instructor, to find better and more interesting ways to explain concepts to those new to economics. One book that really helped me to better understand political discourse was Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions.

Prof. Michael Roach

Michael Roach (Ph.D., Northwestern University) is assistant professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His areas of expertise include law and economics and sports economics.




You went to a small liberal arts college. What are the advantages and disadvantages of going to a small liberal arts college when you plan to go to grad school in economics?

In going to graduate school in economics, you are training to be able to rigorously explore important and interesting questions about the choices people make. Because it is such a wide-ranging discipline, a wide-ranging undergraduate education, as emphasized in a liberal arts college, can be an asset. If it gives students more context in which to think about the tradeoffs people have to make in a variety of settings, it can be a big advantage in developing and sustaining a research agenda. Another, more concrete, advantage of attending a liberal arts college is the small classes and how that leads to a situation where students really get to know their professors. This can lead to students having more (and more productive) conversations about their futures. The interaction with faculty that is encouraged there can really help students understand if graduate school really is for them and, if so, get them on a path to being as prepared as possible for it. A student who wants to go to graduate school in economics is really not all that constrained by the undergraduate course offerings at a liberal arts college: between the economics, math, and computer science courses, a liberal arts education can certainly prepare students for the rigors of a top-flight graduate program.   

One disadvantage of attending a liberal arts college, as compared to a larger research university, is that it is much more difficult to take (or even audit) graduate classes that might help prepare students for studying economics at the graduate level (or to get a sense of whether or not it is something they would want to pursue). Furthermore, at larger universities, faculty members may have larger research budgets that allow them to bring on undergraduate students to do paid research work. If you already know you want to be an economist, the availability of that type of work could be an attractive feature of a larger university.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist or that you would recommend to aspiring economists?

The Winner’s Curse by Richard Thaler was one book that really made me excited about studying economics more deeply. It digs into a variety of situations where economic theory does not explain observed behavior. The paradoxes described are interesting individually, but I liked the book so much because it got me thinking generally about the limits of theories designed to explain what people do. The realization that economics was “messy” in this way made it much more interesting to me and made me excited about the challenges it presents.

Also, even though they aren't about economics specifically, I always think back to several books written by Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, about his life and experiences. There are several of them (The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, and What Do You Care What Other People Think?). I’m obviously not a physicist, but his discussions of science and curiosity apply to economists as well.

What is the worst advice that you have ever been given about becoming an economist?

I actually got really good advice from my professors and mentors about preparing for graduate school and what to expect, so I really can’t complain about that at all. One thing I wish I had realized (I was probably told this at some point, but it was the sort of thing I suppose I had to learn for myself) was that the transition from coursework to doing your own research can be tricky. They are complementary phases of graduate school, certainly, but they require different skills. It’s helpful to at least keep some part of your brain thinking about what types of questions you want to address even as you are powering through your coursework. That makes navigating the transition a bit easier.

Prof. Bryan Caplan

Bryan Caplan (Ph.D., Princeton University) is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He specializes in public economics, public choice, psychology and economics, public opinion, economics of the family and education, genoeconomics, and Austrian economics. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. He is currently writing a new book: The Case Against Education: A Professional Student Explains Why Our Education System Is a Big Waste of Time and Money. He writes EconLog, named by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top websites in the economics blogosphere.


 

You're a prolific blogger, but you're also a Ph.D. Am I, a non-Ph.D., wasting my time blogging about economics?

If you want to be an economist, you are absolutely *not* “wasting your time” with a blog.  It may not help you get into a better college, but writing about a topic is probably the best way to truly learn about it.  If all you do is read, it’s easy to kid yourself about how much you understand.  But writing is explaining, and as an old saying goes, “If you can’t explain something clearly to someone else, you probably don’t understand it yourself.”  And along the way, you’ll make personal connections with practicing economists, any one of which could be a huge professional help to you.  Keep blogging, young economist!

Milton Friedman's Nobel Prize

A few weeks ago, my sister visited the University of Chicago, and took this picture of the Nobel Prize in Economics that Milton Friedman got along with other awards he won.

Prof. J. C. Bradbury

J.C. Bradbury (Ph.D., George Mason University), is the author of The Baseball Economist, a book about how baseball can be explained using economic principles. He is an Associate Professor of Economics at Kennesaw State University just north of Atlanta, and runs the blog sabernomics.com, where he discusses the economics of baseball.

Are there any books that were important to your development as an economist or that you would recommend to aspiring economists, or any books you would perhaps warn young economists about?

I really enjoy The Armchair Economist, by Steven Landsburg. I actually did not read it until I was in graduate school learning about economics in a much more complex way. Landsburg asks seemingly simple questions (e.g., Why is popcorn more expensive at the movies? Why do stores sell items for 99 cents?) but finding the answers with basic economic theory was much harder in practice than it looks on the surface. I used to be a part of a group that focused on asking and answering "Armchair" questions, and I learned so much economics from this interaction. I also enjoyed The Calculus of Consent, by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Their application of economics to government institutions explained so much to me. As for books I would recommend to aspiring economists, Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist is good. Freakonomics is fun, too. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom was way ahead of its time. As for books I would avoid, I tend to forget those rather quickly. 

Do you have any advice to give to students like me?

My advice for students is to remain skeptical and don't just take what your teacher says as truth.   Always speak up in class and ask why. Have confidence in yourself and don't be ashamed of admitting your ignorance. I often have students approach me after class with excellent questions and I say, “why didn't you ask that in class?” If you have a questions, it's likely that many other students are thinking the same thing. I love being able to answer such questions in front of the whole class. Learn to teach yourself by asking hard questions and seeking out answers on your own. The internet makes this easy. Dive in and finds books and papers that can help enlighten you.